‘I have lived a very happy and fulfilled life’

For the briefest of moments, as she plays with her hearing aid, PD James resembles Mrs Richards, the gimlet-eyed battleaxe in Fawlty Towers whose demands for ‘a view’ prompt Basil’s ‘herds of wildebeest’ speech. This is unfair – she doesn’t really need the hearing aid, she is ‘switching it on just in case’, and she is one of the most polite people you could ever meet.

That said, James does look a little like Mrs Richards, with her white hair and erect posture, and she sounds a bit like her – that clipped, educated, ‘Home Service’ English of hers – and she does have a reputation for being a formidable interrogator, as Mark Thompson, the director-general of the BBC, discovered when he agreed to be interviewed by her back in the new year, for the edition of the Today programme she was guest editing. He was well and truly filleted, left stuttering, indeed, as she accused him, with great tact and old school courtesy, of dumbing down the BBC and unwisely over paying his executives.

James has more than one name. She is Baroness James of Holland Park OBE, as well as Phyllis Dorothy White (James is her maiden name). When experimenting with a pen-name at the time her first novel was published in 1962, she considered Phyllis James and Phyllis D James before opting for the more enigmatic initials P D.

Combined with her masculine sounding surname these have led some readers over the years to assume that PD James is a man. Her genre, crime fiction, might be considered more manly than womanly, too, were it not for the fact that so many of the most successful crime writers have been women: from Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers to Ruth Rendell and Patricia Cornwell.

Added to all this, her best known hero, the detective Adam Dalgliesh, is a man. When I ask her what it has been like being, as it were, inside his head for the past 47 years she chuckles and says: ‘Well, he is a male version of me. Brainier than me but his emotions are mine. The empathy is mental rather than physical. I never describe Dalgliesh getting up and getting dressed.’ So is she, like her hero, unsentimental? ‘Yes, I’m very unsentimental. Very.’

Her most recent Dalgliesh novel was published in 2008, might there be another one? ‘I’m not sure yet. Life has been so busy I have only done 10,000 words in six months. I don’t want the standard to drop and I don’t want a reviewer to be saying: “It’s a remarkable book, for a 91 year-old.” And I don’t want them to say: “It’s not vintage PD James.” If I’m not doing it as well as I have done it in the past, then there is no point in my doing it at all.’

James will be 90 on August 3 and, as she sits like a small attentive bird in her sage green drawing room in Holland Park, surrounded by her bookcases, rubber plants and photographs of family and friends, you would not guess that she was approaching this grand old age. She never hesitates or has to search her memory for a word. Though she does have an elegantly handled walking stick by her side, she doesn’t appear to need it. And, as I discovered when I tried to find a free July morning in her diary, she is still an active member of the House of Lords, still writes books and still gives lectures, her next one being on a cruise to New York in the Queen Mary 2.

In light of this, it must surprise even her that she is the age she is. ‘I do have to pinch myself sometimes. There is no getting away from it, at 90 you are old, and there are differences. But I’m glad to be reaching it, if I do reach it.’ On that delicate subject, James breezily says, she doesn’t know whether there is an afterlife or not. ‘But no doubt I’ll find out one way or the other.’ Though she is an Anglican, she thinks the continuation of the genes through children is as good a form of immortality as any. Unsentimental thing that she is, she has told her family that, if it comes to it, she wants to be put out of her misery, perhaps in one of those Swiss clinics we read about.

Her family – she has two daughters, five grandchildren and seven great grandchildren – keep telling her she should slow down. ‘But it’s not easy to slow down. There’s more than one house to run and there are the finances to think about, and an awful lot of people want an awful lot of things. They have to be replied to. But I have no cause for complaint. I have lived a very happy and fulfilled life.

‘Women have more things in their lives than work, which is why it’s easier for them to retire. I think it’s harder for men to retire, especially government ministers. When Macmillan had to resign as prime minister due to ill health he went in for an operation and came round to see them unplugging the prime ministerial red phone by his bed. Brutal.’

A man who knows what it was like to lose the trappings of power lives a few doors down from her: Tony Benn. She sees him some mornings and, though they are on opposite sides of the fence politically, they are always friendly to one another in the street. (She doesn’t take the Conservative whip in the Lords, by the way, but is, broadly speaking, on the right. Indeed there is a photograph of her in her drawing room standing between George and Barbara Bush. And she looks pretty comfortable there.)

The author has lived in this house since 1981, shortly after she retired at 60 from her day job. That was the one at the Home Office where, among other things, she worked as a principal in the Forensic Science Service. I ask why she carried on with that job for so long after becoming a successful novelist. ‘I think it was because I was born in 1920 and grew up in the Depression when you got used to seeing notices saying: “No hands wanted”. I remember my mother saying how lucky we were that my father was a civil servant and so his job was safe.’ Her father was an Inland Revenue official.

But life wasn’t that safe: by her mid-teens her mother was in a mental hospital and James was caring for her two younger siblings. ‘I grew up thinking it was important to have a safe job with a cheque at the end of every month.’ Now it looks as if civil service jobs are no longer ‘safe’ jobs for life.

Having worked in the Home Office, I suggest, she must have an interesting take on the cuts debate. ‘I don’t think you can spend your way out of debt as the previous government tried to do,’ she says. ‘The principles we apply to our home finances are sound. If there is less money coming into the house you have to ask yourself what is essential. A school uniform yes, but not an expensive holiday – or a holiday at all. I can see it is difficult for the Government because you have to decide what is most important and it can be emotive. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to ring fence the health service because there is scope for saving money by reducing the number of managers without having an impact on the quality of the care.’

She knows whereof she speaks. Before the Home Office, which she joined in 1968, she worked as an administrator in the NHS, having had some experience of health care working for the Red Cross in the Second World War. That was what she was doing when she had her first novel published at the age of 42. ‘I remember thinking: the years are slipping by and if I don’t make a start soon I’m going to be a failed writer. There was never going to be a convenient time to get on with it.’ So she had to be selfish and find the time? ‘I did a lot of plotting on long journeys to work but I was also doing evening classes and visiting my husband in hospital, so I didn’t have much spare time. I certainly didn’t tell anyone I was writing a book, apart from my husband, and he was encouraging.’

During the Second World War, her husband was a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps, but he suffered a mental breakdown and ended up in a psychiatric hospital. He wasn’t given a disability pension because it was claimed his mental illness had not been caused by war service. ‘So I had him and two daughters to support, and did evening classes in hospital administration to get my qualifications. Then I was put in charge of psychiatric units and I got two books out of that.’

It was at this time that she saw an advertisement for the civil service and decided to take the examination. Though she hadn’t had the chance to go to university, for financial reasons, she came third in the country. ‘I’ve still got the pre-printed letter which says: “Dear sir” and “sir” is crossed out and “Madam” has been written in by hand. It was so rare for women to take the exam.’

Retiring from the Home Office in 1979 meant she could concentrate on her ‘second job’, as a bestselling crime novelist. ‘All that experience with the NHS and the Home Office, and working as a magistrate was very useful for my fiction. I couldn’t have been a lady writer in a country cottage, it wouldn’t have suited me.’ When she worked as a nurse she saw someone being fed through a tube.

‘I remember thinking: that would be an easy way to kill someone.’ This was the method she used to dispatch a character in her fourth book, Shroud For a Nightingale.

How does she get into the mind of a killer? ‘I think when you create a character you become that character for as long as you are writing about them. So when I am writing about a killer, I am that killer. I am in his mind, which is probably why I don’t have sadistic mass murderers as characters. They terrify me as much as anybody and I wouldn’t want to be in their minds. And, anyway, most mass murderers are mundane.

‘The Cumbrian gunman killed in a random way. He was determined to die and make sure everyone took notice, but his case is not very fascinating to a crime writer. The same is true of psychopaths. They don’t interest me as much from a crime writing point of view because they kill without recognisable motives. What is fascinating is when you have an educated, law-abiding person who steps over a line.’

Can anyone be a murderer? ‘No, I don’t think they can. We could all be guilty of manslaughter. If I saw someone attacking my children I would go for them, but that would not be premeditated murder.’ She has said in the past that she believes in ‘emotional reticence’ and finds the modern tendency to go in for hugging and counselling ‘creepy’.

But has she never seen a psychotherapist, even out of professional curiosity? ‘No, no. And because I’ve had a husband who was mentally ill, I had some experience of psychiatric clinics and wasn’t that impressed.’ Her husband, Connor Bantry White, died in 1964 at the relatively young age of 44. There has been speculation that he deliberately took an overdose of drugs mixed with alcohol, but as far as I am aware she has never commented on this.

Even now, after all these years, when I ask her what was the cause of her husband’s death, she hesitates before answering. ‘He died as a result of his mental illness,’ she says carefully. ‘And that is one of the reasons I have reservations about psychiatry. I think with other medical conditions there is a diagnosis that is understandable. With a cancerous tumour, for example, you take it out and try chemotherapy. But with mental illness you are talking about the difference between the mind and the brain. How do you treat it? Nowadays, instead of spending months and months on a couch, you are encouraged to recognise what is wrong with you and take some action. Deal with it through medication or whatever. That to me seems reasonable and logical. I’m sure clinical depression is a physical illness. A descent into hell. Not to be confused with the mild depression we all suffer from from time to time. The trouble today is that we all feel we have the right to be happy all the time, and we don’t.’

Mild depression doesn’t lead to suicide, I note. ‘Exactly. It is terrible to think that someone can feel so bad that they want to get out that way. And often it is chance. It is a rainy day and someone is left on their own. If someone had called they might not have done it. What makes me angry is the suicides of young people. These, I think, are often acts of aggression against the family. It leaves such grief behind. You would think anyone with any moral sense would stop and think what their suicide would do to their parents.’

The closest she has come to discussing her husband’s death was when she appeared on In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, and it wasn’t that close. When Dr Anthony Clare asked: ‘What happened?’ there was a long silence before James said: ‘I found him.’ And that was all she would say. In the past she has said she feels that she has a responsibility to the dead, for what her husband might not want to be told. ‘I think the more dramatic part of his life, of his illness, is for me. I don’t talk about it to my daughters and they don’t talk about it to me.’

While this wish must, of course, be respected, I think it is reasonable to ask about a reference she made to her husband’s illness in her autobiography. ‘One suffers with the patient and for oneself,’ she wrote. ‘Another human being who was once a beloved companion can become not only a stranger, but occasionally a malevolent stranger.’ In light of this, did she ever question her own sanity when she was looking after her husband? ‘No. I have a strong ego so I never questioned my sanity.’

It is perhaps not a coincidence of timing that Dalgliesh entered her life shortly before her husband left it. Dalgliesh wasn’t to be distracted by a family, so she killed off his wife in childbirth and had him throw himself into work as a way of escaping the loneliness. She was still quite young when her husband died; did she ever consider remarriage? ‘No, never remarried. If I had met someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, I would have. I had men friends and I like men generally but I never met the right one again. And I think from their point of view I would have been difficult. Always so busy. Always writing. And I have my children, who have always been important to me. An absolute delight.’

There is, she reckons, an element of selfishness to writing, because of the space you have to create. ‘There is also what Graham Greene called the splinter of ice in the heart. If I had a friend in distress I would have no hesitation in putting my arms around her to comfort her, but part of me would be observing. That happens. With some of the most difficult things that have happened in my life, part of me stands aside and watches me deal with it. In that sense my life has been a continual narrative.’

If novel writing was her second job, then being a paid up member of the great and the good must have been her third. Among other things she has been a chair of the Booker Prize, the Society of Authors and the Arts Council Literature Advisory Panel. She was also a governor of the BBC. In retrospect, does she think her interview with Mark Thompson, and the public support she had for it afterwards, was a wake up call for the BBC? Arguably, had it not been for her astonishing intervention, the BBC would not be about to reveal its stars’ salaries now.

‘I have a great deal of sympathy with people who say their salary should be private,’ she says. ‘But I don’t think that can apply to anyone paid from the public purse, whether it is a civil servant or someone paid by the license fee. We have a right to know. The problem with the BBC is that their money does not go down if the quality of their programmes goes down. You don’t have that luxury in, say, a newspaper, because if you did that year after year your circulation would go down and so would your profits.’

She mentioned earlier that there were ‘differences’ in being 90, meaning physical. But what about social? How is the world of 2010 different from the world of 1930, say, when she was a 10 year-old? ‘It is a different world. When I was young our house was lit by gas. No telephone. No car. A Victorian child could have moved in with us and felt at home. Whereas if a Victorian child moved into a modern day household he would be utterly lost,’ James says. ‘Life today for a young person is all about computers and being in constant communication, with blogs and tweets, and so on. Not that that makes them any wiser.’

There is an endearing, no-nonsense briskness and good humour to PD James, one that is perhaps something of a defence mechanism (I bet she will disapprove of this cod psychology). Given that she has had to deal with considerable emotional pain, as well as the chaos of living with a mentally ill person, it is telling that she has found consolation in crime fiction, a genre that always offers resolution and creates moral order. She likes being in control and doesn’t like taking risks, which is why she has grilles on her windows and always double locks her doors, even when she is at home.

It is also telling that she has never experimented with drugs, because she finds the thought of being out of control ‘too frightening’. Her mind would no longer be her own. She drinks moderately, about one glass of wine a day, but has never been drunk.

Though she has a graceful and precise prose style, James was once described by Kingsley Amis as ‘Iris Murdoch with murders’; her age and her conservative world-view can make her fiction seem dated at times. Her conversation, too. She says ‘golly’ and ‘my dear’, but doesn’t swear.

In a review of one of her recent novels the critic Mark Lawson wrote: ‘When reading PD James you do become nostalgic for crack cocaine, anal sex and people calling each other mutha.’ ‘Well it’s not part of my world,’ she says with a laugh when I quote this to her. ‘I try to keep away from it. I can write about it if I have to but mostly my murderers are respectable, upper-middle-class people. They don’t go in for a lot of crack.’

Her characters do have sex though. ‘Yes, they sleep together and some have been gay but I mostly leave the details to the reader’s imagination. Dalgliesh sleeps with his girlfriend and is unmarried but I don’t think you need to describe sex in detail. Same with television. All these heaving buttocks. It’s not erotic – perhaps it is for a 12 year-old, but not to an adult.’

To mark her 90th birthday, Faber and Faber have brought out a new paperback collection of her crime novels, and very handsome they look too, with their brooding covers. Needless to say, there isn’t any swearing in them. ‘Oh, I know all the swear words, my dear,’ she says, ‘and use them myself sometimes, in private. But I see no need for them in my books.’

It is time to leave. She sees me to the door, unlocks it from the inside, lets me out, waves goodbye and closes the door. As I am walking away I hear the sound of the key turning in the lock once more.

Coming around again: the Seventies songstress on famous friendships, affairs and therapy.

As Carly Simon is showing me around her house on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, she mentions, matter-of-factly, that it is haunted. Guests in the spare bedroom always hear the same conversation, apparently, about a record deal.

At 64 she seems little changed from her Seventies heyday, a rangy blonde in a rah-rah skirt and knee-length snakeskin boots. And those teeth still have you shielding your eyes.

Indeed, such is the warmth of her wide and white smile, I resist the urge to point out that ghosts do not exist. Besides, even a sceptic like me cannot deny that there is a metaphorical presence in this house, the ghost of a man not yet dead.

I refer to James Taylor, her ex-husband and fellow singer-songwriter and guitarist. Fellow legend, too, for the couple were rock nobility who used to hang out with film stars and presidents, who topped the charts, who appeared together on the cover of Rolling Stone.

‘James built this house in 1969,’ she says, showing me old photographs of the building site. ‘It was just a cabin in the wood and we would sleep on a pull-out couch over there.’

The house has expanded a great deal since then. It now has a recording studio, library, tennis court and a 45ft-tall watchtower that you reach by a nautical-style spiral staircase.

Today, with a dusting of snow on the surrounding fields, it feels cosy. There are candles everywhere, a log fire crackling in the grate and lentil soup cooking on the stove.

The room we are sitting in is dominated by a baby grand piano. There is a chessboard set up and an acoustic guitar propped against a rocking chair.

Her friends on the island have included Jackie Onassis and Bill Clinton. There are photographs of them but none of James Taylor that I can see.

‘James who?’ she says with a laugh.

Their marriage was one of the most glamorous, high-profile pairings of the Seventies, but it was pushed to the limits by his heroin addiction and infidelities.

When he picked up a venereal disease while on tour – ‘a road accident’, as the euphemism had it – he told her in this room.

Understandably, she didn’t take it well and swung at him with the nearest thing to hand, a guitar. When she calmed down she told him she had some news, too. She was pregnant.

They divorced in 1983 after 10 years and two children. He remarried, twice. She once, to a poet.

When I meet Ben, their 33-year-old son, I see James Taylor haunts his features, too. The resemblance is uncanny, even with his Mormon beard and beanie hat.

Ben Taylor lives in a cottage in the grounds here, but still sees a lot of his father. He is even closer to his mother, but he doesn’t exactly act as a go-between, because the two do not talk.

I get the impression Ben cannot even mention his mother’s name in his father’s company.

‘It is so important that Ben has a good relationship with his father,’ Simon says. ‘Given my druthers I would have a good relationship with him, too. But I don’t seem to have any druthers about me!’

‘Oh, is that an Americanism? It means given what I would rather have, I would rather have any relationship with James – be it frustrating, mediocre, whatever – than no relationship at all, than what we have now, which is a long empty alleyway of memories leading up to a big wall of silence.’

Blimey. You can tell she wrote her own lyrics, can’t you? Ben is a musician who has the same vocal style as his father.

‘Actually, I think the more Ben sings, the less like James he sounds,’ Simon says. ‘He is an interesting combination of the two of us. His voice box is more like mine but the way his tongue sits in his mouth, and the way he pronounces words, is just like James.’

Ben has performed on and co-produced his mother’s new album. It features a couple of new songs but is mostly new acoustic versions of her old songs, reinterpreted for a voice that is about half an octave lower than it used to be.

It includes Anticipation, Coming Around Again and – how could it not? – You’re So Vain, the original of which had Mick Jagger on backing vocals and was one of the biggest-selling singles of the Seventies.

If her ex-husband haunts this house, that song must haunt her. But she doesn’t seem to mind talking about it. Indeed, it was so cold when I arrived she poured shots of apricot cognac and sang, ‘Her cognac was apricot!’ which is a decent joke, if you recall the lyrics to You’re So Vain.

There is a website dedicated to that song which lists the dozens of times she has been asked by journalists over the years who, among her many former lovers, the song was written about. Cat Stevens? Kris Kristofferson? Mick Jagger?

The usual assumption is that it is Warren Beatty. The actor did, after all, ring her to thank her for the song, because he was so vain he thought it was about him.

At the time they had their affair, she has said, Beatty was still relatively undiscovered as a Don Juan. She felt she was one among thousands – ‘It hadn’t reached, you know, the populations of small countries.’

She has always refused to say who You’re So Vain is about, quite rightly arguing that people don’t really want the truth, they prefer the riddle. I tell her I am going to be the first journalist in almost 40 years not to ask her, because I’ve already worked out the answer. It’s about Willie Donaldson, isn’t it?

She laughs. ‘Yeah, that’s it. You’ve got it! Actually, I suppose it could have been about him, in that the time period would have been accurate, and a lot of the specifics in the story might have been embellished. I mean, the Leer jet could have been a Falcon. I don’t think Willie flew by Leer jet.’

Willie Donaldson was her least-likely conquest, or rather she was his. He was perhaps best known as the satirical author of The Henry Root Letters and the man who first staged Beyond the Fringe, but he was also a serial bankrupt, crack addict and pimp, one who ended up dying in a seedy London bedsit, his computer still logged onto a lesbian porn site.

But when they met he was a glamorous, Cambridge-educated playboy and impresario who had inherited a fortune and was going out with the actress Sarah Miles.

It was 1966. London was swinging. Carly Simon was 20. Donaldson described her as ‘the answer to any sane man’s prayers; funny, quick, erotic, extravagantly talented’.

Sadly for both of them, he wasn’t exactly a sane man. Eccentric would be a better word. They got engaged, then he dumped her.

‘I was madly in love with him,’ she says now. ‘And after he broke my heart I couldn’t regain my interest in men for four years. I kept trying to understand why I found him so exotic. It wasn’t just because he had an English accent.

‘We met on July 8 and by July 20 he had moved out of his place with Sarah Miles and had moved in with me at Wilton Place. We went up to the Portobello Road to buy tea sets. It was gangbusters. Then the Dear John letter came on October 24.

‘We started to communicate again once I was married to James and he wrote back saying: “There hasn’t been a day when I haven’t thought of you.” All this tenderness poured out of him, when I was at a safe distance!’

Is it possible that he was being kind when he left, because he knew how self-destructive he was?

‘I don’t think so. I think in retrospect it was a good thing that I didn’t marry Willie but it wasn’t that he was being kind. I think he knew his ways were too perverse for me, that I was too much of a prude.

‘There was a story he told of my taking a bath then lying naked on the bed and saying: “What do you think?” That never happened. I have no idea why he felt the need to project that. He didn’t even have a bath tub!’

He used to call her Little Frog Footman. ‘I think it was from Cinderella. He did appreciate me. I don’t think I could have loved him as much as I did if he hadn’t brought out something that I really loved about myself. My boyfriend Richard, who you met earlier, he’s like that. He makes me feel so good about myself.’

Richard is a surgeon, a veteran of the first Gulf War, and a divorcee 10 years her junior.

He is handsome in an all-American, flinty-jawed way, and when we met he told me that, because his operations often take several hours, he likes to have music playing in the operating theatre – and yes, there is some Carly Simon on the playlist. And no, he’s not that kind of surgeon and that wasn’t how they met.

He is a leading specialist in laparoscopic surgery. Simon has had breast surgery, but it was reconstructive, following a mastectomy in the late Nineties. That must have concentrated her mind, I say, given her a stark intimation of her own mortality.

‘It sure did,’ she says. ‘One of the things about creativity is you can be in denial about these things. When I found out I had cancer, there were four hours in which I was pounding my head on the marble kitchen top saying, “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.” But then I felt as if this little army in uniform was flooding me. They had come to help me fight it. I felt really strong about it after that. It was one of the strongest periods of my life.’

There is a new biography of Warren Beatty, by Peter Biskind, which suggests that when he met Carly Simon in a bar and she told him about her breast cancer he looked uncomfortable and ran off. She has a copy of it on her bookshelf.

‘Oh God!’ she says, rocking back on her sofa. ‘I meant to hide that before you got here!’

The book quotes Beatty as saying he has slept with more than 12,000 women. That must make his ex-lovers feel pretty special!

‘You think? You know what? I’ve been flirting with the idea of writing an autobiography because I was talking to Mike Nichols about all these biographies coming out and he said I should never co-operate with them because look what they’ve done to Warren.

‘That book is full of inaccuracies. I haven’t read it myself but Richard read out some passages, one of them saying I cut a swathe through the famous and notorious men of my generation. A swathe? I know exactly what I did every single day because I kept a daily diary from the age of seven until 1983 when I broke up with James.’

‘I needed much more therapy than that!’

Simon had a nervous breakdown in the early Sixties, one brought on by a wine allergy. She has been seeing therapists ever since and, to this day, suffers from a debilitating stage fright, which means she hardly ever performs in public.

‘When I’m feeling anxious or depressed, I do find it helps to reach for a pen and paper. There is something about writing things down, that hand-eye combination, that makes me feel calmer.

‘Seeing things that are bothering you written down takes away their power. It gives you a perspective. Helps you contain them. The other day I was feeling so terrified and sad I had to pull the sheets over my head. I think Richard was a little shocked by my behaviour.’

Her parents seem to have been part of the problem. Her father, also called Richard, was a wealthy publisher, the Simon of Simon and Schuster. The young Carly grew up among the rich and famous of Manhattan. Not only Rodgers and Hammerstein but also George Gershwin were regular guests at the family home.

Her father died in 1960 when she was 15. ‘It was a difficult age. There was an emotional numbness surrounding his death for me that hasn’t been broken through yet. I had an even bigger reaction when I was 10 and I found out he had had his first heart attack. That demolished me. So freaked out.

‘I would knock on wood 500 times every night thinking that would keep him from dying. Compulsive behaviour. The fact that he didn’t die the first night I did it meant I had to keep doing it. I was so scared. I eventually began knocking less, getting it down to 300, then 100 in the last year, then he died.’

There were unresolved issues. ‘I wanted him to live longer so that I could see him and my mother really love each other. I couldn’t bear the thought that they didn’t have the perfect marriage, with the perfect house, and the perfect car and the perfect apple pie cooling on the window ledge.

‘My mother fell in love with someone else, you see. And when my sisters told me when I was 12 that my parents didn’t love each other, that was when I started having serious anxiety attacks.’

Did that memory impinge upon her own marriage?

‘I think we do compensate by going off in the opposite direction. You can repeat the mistakes of your parents’ marriage or you can go out of your way not to repeat them.

‘I heard Ben say the other day that he really doesn’t want to repeat what he saw in the relationship between myself and James. Yet those little repetitions sneak up on you from behind and there you are doing the same things your mother did to your father.’

She sounds like a hopeless romantic.

‘I am. As a child I used to read Gone with the Wind over and over again. I wanted to be Scarlett O’Hara. I never wanted to believe that it was possible that there could be infidelity. I never wanted to be believe that it was even possible for a man to look another way, even for a moment. My bubble of monogamy was pierced in a harsh way.’

Speaking of biographies, there was an excellent triple one which came out not long ago called Girls Like Us, about Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Carly Simon. It portrayed them as feminist icons, yet that is not how Simon saw herself at the time.

‘I wanted to be the little woman behind the man leading the academic life,’ she says. ‘I was too shy to be front of stage.

‘The other day I came across a recording I made of a night at my apartment when I was living with Kris Kristofferson. Bob Dylan had been around earlier and we were all passing around the guitar. Whenever it came to my turn I would run into the kitchen and say I’d left the coffee on the stove or something. Shyness. Scared to perform.’

Shyness? Really? Wasn’t she shy and confident at the same time? Driving with her foot on the break and the accelerator?

‘Yes, but with me it goes from one extreme to the other like a pendulum, until I become the hum of the pendulum. I stole that line from Mike Nichols. If I say anything good, I’ve probably ripped it off. You’ve got to hear this recording. Can I play it for you?’

She goes upstairs, returns with a MacBook Pro and finds the sound file. Kris Kristofferson sounds drunk when he is talking but when he is playing his guitar and singing he sounds pretty good.

Was it only the guitar they were passing around?

‘As I recall, it was more about booze that night. I did used to smoke grass though. There was a time for about two years when I would roll myself a joint every morning when I woke up.’

Ending the day with a joint, maybe. But starting it? Surely that’s a slippery slope.

‘But you get used to it. I guess I was stoned as much of the waking hour as I wasn’t stoned. I stopped it all very suddenly when I was pregnant with Sally.’

Simon began her career as part of a double act with her sister Lucy. They were called the Simon Sisters and on the cabaret circuit they opened for Woody Allen, among others.

They split up when Lucy married a psychiatrist and had a child. They still sometimes duet on the phone but it must have been hard for Lucy to watch as her sister’s solo career took off?

‘I guess it was but if she felt that, she had the good grace not to show it. She was never going to say to me, “Damn you and your number one singles”. That said, my family were all pretty piqued around the time I married James. That seemed too much for us to all of a sudden become like this royal couple. Yet it was never discussed. I still feel a little guilty about it.’

‘Because I wasn’t the one who wanted fame, but got it anyway.’

Famous people had always surrounded her, though. Is that why the Clintons and Jackie Onassis found it easy to be in her company? Because she wasn’t star struck?

‘Probably. I remember with Jackie especially…’ She trails off.

‘Sorry, but she was Jackie to me. To try and be coy about it would be even more obnoxious than sounding as if I was name-dropping. I used to take great pleasure in being relaxed in front of her and think she appreciated that because she always seemed relaxed with me.

‘I think a lot of the people in her life were emotionally uptight and not willing to share. We had a similar sense of humour and were attracted to a lot of the same people. We loved each other and I remember one of the first times we had lunch together I was really nervous because she was half an hour late.

‘She had been stuck in the elevator but she turned up as calm as anything and I was the one who was hyperventilating. I had to take a Valium washed down with gin. She thought this was funny and told me I was like a thoroughbred racehorse. High strung. Which is true.’

It is nearly dusk and Richard comes in from outside. He has been clearing wood and now has a bonfire going. Simon suggests we all go out and roast marshmallows on it. She puts on a black velvet frock-coat with a furry collar and, carrying a packet of marshmallows in one hand, picks up a guitar in the other.

Well, it is a campfire and she is Carly Simon. Somehow she manages to strum while wearing long, white silk evening gloves. A thoroughbred racehorse, indeed.

His 1986 musical gave the world its darkest hero and broke every box office record going. Now, amid feverish anticipation, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Phantom’ is returning. But is his creator coping with the pressure?

There are two Andrew Lloyd Webbers, separated by a hyphen. There is Lord Lloyd-Webber, the mogul who owns seven London theatres, collects vintage burgundy, Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and wives (well, three of them anyway). He is a Tory. A man of refined taste. Establishment to his bones.

And then there is Andrew Lloyd Webber without a hyphen. He was so precocious as a child he could compose almost before he could walk. He won a scholarship to Westminster School and an exhibition to read history at Magdalene College, Oxford, only to drop out after one term in order to pursue his dream of writing musicals.

This must have seemed like an act of rebellion bordering on patricide, given that his father was a professor of classical composition at the Royal College of Music. (And come to think of it, even Lloyd Webber’s Tory tendencies have a rebellious cast to them, given that his domineering mother, a piano teacher, was a socialist.)

Lloyd Webber without a hyphen seems to have been impulsive, driven, contrary and perhaps a little socially awkward and gauche, but a man with keen populist instincts and no qualms about pandering to the sort of middle-brow tastes that might have made his father shudder.

So there’s the paradox, then. Not only is he a nonconformist Establishment figure, he is also a slightly vulgar aesthete. And the two identities are separated by a hyphen that was added in 1997 to avoid confusion when he became Baron Lloyd-Webber of Sydmonton. As he might put it, Lloyd ain’t his first name.

In terms of his vocabulary, by the way, he does have a tendency to strain for the colloquial, perhaps in compensation for his received pronunciation – as well as saying ‘ain’t’, he will refer to a ‘beaker’ of wine, or his ‘PR honchos’, or his ‘grey matter’. Anyway, I think it is the Andrew Lloyd Webber without the hyphen that I meet in a rehearsal studio near Waterloo.

At 62, he looks trim and healthy. He is wearing jeans and a pale blue shirt. His hands are small, his grip light and, contrary to reputation, his eye contact steady. His manner is polite but impatient and distracted, and a habit to talk over the top of people gives him the air of a busy man, one who really shouldn’t have had that second cup of coffee.

Prior to this meeting I have spent a long morning at his office in Covent Garden listening, under armed guard it seemed, to a recording of the much-anticipated ‘continuation’ – not sequel – of The Phantom of the Opera. Called Love Never Dies, it takes up the phantom’s story 10 years on, when he has left his lair under the Paris Opera in order to haunt the fairgrounds of Coney Island, Brooklyn.

The musical, which begins previewing at the Adelphi Theatre next week, is to my ears more vaudevillian than operatic, with recurring background hints of a fairground barrel organ. But the overall mood seems similar to Phantom, a mixture of soaring ballads and tender love songs.

Predictably enough, ticket sales have been more than healthy. There are a lot of Phantom fans out there, you see. A lot. In terms of revenue, it is the most successful entertainment of all time, way ahead of the combined world tours of the Rolling Stones, even ahead of Star Wars, Titanic and , so far, Avatar. It has taken nearly £2?billion.

Lloyd Webber began planning what would become Love Never Dies back in 1997. Dozens of ideas were chewed over. At one point even Frederick Forsyth and Ben Elton were called in to give it a go, though not together.

The problem was not the music; Lloyd Webber writes quickly. ‘I often think of random melodies,’ he tells me. ‘And I pretty much hear in my head what I want to do with the orchestra as I’m writing on the piano. But the most important thing with musical theatre is the story. That is where you have to start. With the exception of Cats, which is an oddball, it is always the story that is the most important aspect and when they haven’t worked, as with Woman in White, it was because the story wasn’t right.’

His breakthrough came when he worked out the only place the Phantom could hide in 1907 without people staring at his face. ‘The answer was Coney Island, where freaks can walk around without being noticed. Freud gave the best quote about the place: ‘The only reason to go to the United States is to go to Coney Island.’ So this made the story about vaudeville instead of opera.

Like the original Phantom, Love Never Dies reflects Lloyd Webber’s highly romantic sensibility. ‘This one has taken romance as far as it will go,’ he says. ‘This felt like coming back to my own turf. When it was finally unlocked for me after 20 years of attempts I felt I was coming back to a character I knew well.

‘If you looked at the logic of the original, the whole thing falls apart. I remember Hal Prince saying we have to start one scene before the last has ended and let the music overlap – and then just go for it. We don’t need to explain all this because the audience will get it. The story of the Phantom is one of rock masquerading as opera. The passions in Love Never Dies are rock passions.’

To what does Lloyd Webber attribute the enduring appeal of Phantom? ‘It’s to do with sexuality and, well, I remember 20 years ago going to a charity event Elton was giving in a restaurant and I found myself, to my great joy, sitting among five of the world’s most beautiful supermodels and they were all talking about Phantom because it had just opened.

‘I think it was Elle Macpherson who said: “If you ask X she is worried about her nose and if you ask Y she is worried she isn’t tall enough and Z thinks she is too skinny. We are all of us insecure about our looks.” And I think that’s it. That is why people identify with the Phantom. Everyone has something about themselves they would like to change.’

To say there is anticipation for the new show is to understate. Is he nervous that Love Never Dies might not live up to expectation? ‘There is pressure. I can’t tell you whether Love Never Dies is of its time, because it ain’t Legally Blonde or Hairspray. All I can say is that I think the story is strong and the lyrics are the best I’ve had since Tim, if you take TS Eliot out of the equation.’

His musical Cats, it should be explained, the one that was a fixture in the West End for 21 years, was based on words by TS Eliot. And the Tim he refers to is Sir Tim Rice.

Rice was the reason the 17-year-old Lloyd Webber dropped out of Oxford. It was a life-changing encounter. Sir Tim was five years older, taller, longer haired, more urbane and socially confident. He also had an ability to write wry and catchy lyrics that electrified the young Andrew.

When these were combined with Lloyd Webber’s instantly memorable and charming melodies, a chemical combustion took place. The obvious comparison of a librettist meeting his perfect composer is when Gilbert met Sullivan, but a better one might be Bernie Taupin and Elton John.

Either way, Rice and Lloyd Webber clicked and within a few years they had produced three of the most successful musicals of all time: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita. Then, at the height of their creative powers, they fell out.

As Lloyd Webber is the richest person in the British music industry, ahead even of Sir Paul McCartney, it is safe to assume he is not just doing Love Never Dies for the money. He can’t still be hungry can he? I mean, if he still needs the sense of affirmation that comes with success, after all these years of it, isn’t that a form of failure?

‘Why am I still hungry? I think it is just that I love the collaborative element. You depend on each other in a project like this. It is a shared adventure between the cast, director, designer, costume maker, lighting engineer, choreographer. One ingredient could be wrong and a great piece of work will disappear.’

The comment is a reminder that, for all his success, Lloyd Webber has known failure. In fact, he hasn’t had a new hit for a while, and by his standards Woman in White, The Beautiful Game and Whistle Down the Wind constitute flops.

Could it be that his recent brush with mortality, last autumn he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, has focused his mind? To paraphrase a certain mid-market tabloid, Love never dies – but he nearly did.

‘Yes and I did nearly die when I saw that headline because the point about my illness was that I didn’t nearly die, because we caught it in time. I kept having to get up to pee in the night and so I went to have a checkup and, luckily, they spotted it. Men over 50 should really have a prostate check regularly. It is the most common form of cancer in men and if you can get it before it angles off into other parts of the body, it’s not a problem.’

He had a prostatectomy in November and looks very healthy now. ‘Yes,’ he says with a grin. ‘I am. In the circumstances.’ He has an endearingly self-deprecating anecdote to share about the time he was told to leave The London Clinic by a side door via a row of huge dustbins, in order to avoid a gang of paparazzi that had assembled outside the hospital’s front door.

He assumed they were for him but next morning awoke to vast coverage of Amy Winehouse leaving the same place having had, allegedly, a breast enhancement.

He speaks about how he accepts the operation may leave you with an incontinence problem, but that this gets better every day. It can also leave you impotent, but not necessarily. As for the infertility, he is not worried about that because he has five children.

It must have given him intimations of mortality though. ‘Yes, it makes you think.’ What is it all for? That sort of thing? ‘No, more that it makes you realise who your real friends are. I was struck by the number of people who were my friends a long time ago who were the most supportive. Tim, for example. He rang my wife every day. And my first wife Sarah came to see me and she happened to arrive on the same day as Tim and they were getting on like a house on fire, catching up and talking about old times.’

He grins again. ‘There they were talking away by the bed and I might as well not have been there! And then the phone went and it was Sarah Brightman and I thought this is not great timing so I said: “This is a little awkward Sarah, can I call you back?” It made me laugh.’ Sarah Brightman was known as Sarah Two.

Was he surprised to find himself on his third marriage by the time he reached his mid forties? ‘Well I’ve been married 20 years this time, quite a stretch. I’m very pleased that I am still very close to both my ex wives. Both of them have stayed at my place in Majorca this past year. At different times.’

I have to say, I am impressed by the way he has remained friendly with his exes be they in business or marriage. ‘Yes, Tim is such a good friend and Sarah was wonderful when I was ill. She heard the roughs for Love Never Dies before it was mixed in LA last summer and I was quite worried about playing it to her because, in a way, it would mean more to her than to me.’

His marriage to Brightman lasted six years and was played out in the spotlight, including the acrimony of the divorce. Was it a passionate affair to begin with? ‘I think with her it was more about the music.’

He makes himself a coffee and is adept at operating the complicated looking machine. I’m surprised given that he probably has butlers to do that at home.

‘We don’t have butlers. Obviously we have people who look after the houses, but I try not to run things formally. I have good people around me. My PA, my driver, but my best investment is my black cab which means you can go anywhere.’

When he says his cancer made him think, was that partly about the meaning of material possessions?

‘I don’t think I am that materialistic, actually. Obviously at home in the country the art collection is important but we have one big room in the middle of the house where we do everything, the television, the kitchen, everything. I like cooking so I always like to have the kitchen in the central place. Music, architecture and pictures have always been my passions, and all that material wealth has meant for me, is being able to have some of the pictures I liked.’

I try and get a measure of what he was like as a schoolboy. Was he serious? ‘I was a bit. I was passionate about architecture and so was considered an oddball. I could have been academic but I got bored. I think I was quite popular at prep school because they thought I was weird playing the violin, and then one day I got up and did a parody of the masters, six tunes, and after that they thought I had a sense of humour.’

Were his parents pushy? ‘I think my mother would have preferred it if I was more interested in history, but I wanted to plough my own furrow. My parents were supportive about me leaving Oxford, even though the family didn’t have any money. We didn’t have anything to fall back on. We have that now with our 18 year-old, who I have a feeling isn’t going to go down the university route. He’s got all his grades, but he’s been doing work experience and enjoying that. I’ll support him if I think he’s going to the right place.’

When Lloyd Webber was that age, the right place meant being alongside Tim Rice. ‘Yes once I met Tim I realised how few really good lyricists there were. I was aware of a chemistry between us but also an awareness that there was no one else around who had the sort of individuality he had. The turn of phrase he had was so quirky and individual. I had met no one who had come even remotely close to him.’

He talks about Sir Tim a lot. You get the feeling it was, in some ways, his most painful divorce. Was part of the problem that Tim’s heart wasn’t in music theatre? That he finds it a little, well, embarrassing? Wasn’t he always more interested in rock and pop?

‘I think that is true, though goodness knows, he’s made enough records. He’s sometimes deliberately provocative about these things, that’s all. Saying he hates musicals. But I think deep down he cares much more about his work that he would ever say.

‘We’ve written a few songs together since Evita and we almost have an album’s worth. And always with Tim there will be a couple of lines in a song that no other lyricist could have come up with. There’s one we’ve worked on called Dance the Dance and it has the line: “She was on the ball and he was so last season”. Wonderful.’

Lloyd Webber had even been hoping that Sir Tim would come on board to write the lyrics for Love Never Dies. He was quoted as saying: ‘I have implied it and he knows perfectly well to phone me.’

Clearly there is still a strong bond between them, so what went wrong? ‘Where Tim and I really had a parting of the ways was over Chess. I think I put it the wrong way to Tim when I said I thought the plot wasn’t theatrical. I said what it needs is a theatre craftsman to give it some John le Carré-type suspense. And for once we got out of step and then next I heard he was doing it with [Abba’s] Benny and Bjorn.’

It sounds like his feelings were hurt. ‘I was a bit hurt, yes, because I felt I could have done something with it. As it turned out, the songs from Chess are right up there with some of the very best ever written for musical theatre. If you audition in New York you will always hear four songs from Chess. But still, for me, there was a fundamental problem with the script. It never worked in the theatre, for me.’

Having been such a successful double act was he nervous about going it alone? ‘Well I had an immediate disaster without Tim, which was when I did Jeeves with Alan Ayckbourn. But then I did a big hit album on my own with Variations and that was a turning point.’

For his part, Sir Tim went on to have a huge hit with The Lion King, made by Lloyd Webber’s only real rival in music theatre, Disney. Ouch.

It occurs to me that, in some way, Sir Tim, who supposedly finds musicals a bit embarrassing, might have been something of a father figure to Lloyd Webber.

I ask Lloyd Webber – who has been quoted as saying that he was never that close to his father – whether he ever got a sense that his actual father considered musicals to be, well, not one of the higher art forms.

‘Not at all. I remember him bringing home a single by the Shadows and saying they are probably the finest quartet working in Britain at the moment. My father got every scholarship going and followed an academic side, but I know deep down inside that he would have preferred to go into film music. His make up was such that he wouldn’t have been able to cope with the problems that crop up constantly in the music theatre or film music world. Also, I think he would have thought he was letting the family down.’ Because? ‘My grandfather belittled it.’

For the record, one of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rare forays into classical music was his Requiem in 1986. It is beautiful and haunting and deserved the Grammy it won. It was composed in memory of his father, William Lloyd Webber, without a hyphen.

As ‘Every Good Boy Deserves Favour’ is revived at the National Theatre, Britain’s most infamous playwright talks politics, famous muses and the true meaning of ‘Stoppardian’.

The tall, hunched figure smoking on the roof terrace of the National Theatre has his back to me, but his Wildean mien, and indeed mane, makes him unmistakable.

As he smokes, he contemplates the inky clouds over the equally black Thames and, for a moment, I contemplate him. If only he had a silk scarf draped over his shoulder, this tableau vivant would be complete.

Sir Tom Stoppard’s face, when he turns, is still, at 72, as brooding and handsome as ever. In his youth he was compared with Mick Jagger, because of his pout, but a better comparison would be with David Gilmour of Pink Floyd.

That a playwright should be compared with a pop star at all is revealing. There was always something quite rock and roll about Sir Tom.

That, indeed, was the title of his most recent play, written in 2006, the one about the role of pop music in the emergence of democracy in Czechoslovakia between the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

His new play, or rather the new National Theatre revival of his old play Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), features music too, a full orchestra, with a score written by Andre Previn, and we shall come to that.

Few contemporary playwrights have a style so distinctive that their surname enters the language as an adjective. There’s Pinteresque and Stoppardian and, well, that’s about it.

Stoppardian seems to mean dealing with philosophical concepts in a witty, ironic and linguistically complex way, usually with multiple timelines and visual humour.

A good example is Arcadia (1993), a bittersweet country-house comedy that sweeps between Regency England and today, taking in discussions of romanticism, classicism and thermodynamics.

But what does he think it means? I imagine he is going to groan and say he hates the word, but he shrugs.

‘It doesn’t mean anything as bounded as other epithets made from surnames do. I don’t think Stoppardian has a precise definition.

‘For me, personally, it means something different to what others mean by it. To me it means another hapless, feckless, fatuous episode in my life, brought on by my own forgetfulness or incompetence.’

Example? He thinks. ‘Well, last month I found myself waiting for an electric train in Tokyo, unable to read any of the signs. I was standing on the platform with two cases and this bag,’ he lifts up a bulging, brown leather shoulder bag.

‘It had my passport in it, as well as my money, credit cards, everything. A train arrived early and, as they are incredibly punctual about everything there, I figured it couldn’t be mine. But to make sure, I got on the train to find a guard to show my ticket to.

‘Then I heard a hiss and a clunk behind me and the doors were closing and the train was moving off, with my bags still on the platform. “That’s it,” I thought, “I’m f—ed”.’

This being Japan he got off at the next station, phoned the agent he is with in Japan and his bags were duly collected and sent to meet him on the next train. ‘Anyway, the point of that story is that Stoppardian for me means the ability to cock things up.’

What do we know about Sir Tom Stoppard? He was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937. His family moved to Singapore, where his father was killed in a Japanese bombing raid. His mother remarried a British Army major.

He went to an English public school in the North of England, Pocklington, and instead of going to university, went into journalism, working as a reporter and theatre critic for a Bristol newspaper. His first play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, was written in 1966 and proved a critical and box office success.

He married, had two children, got divorced, remarried and had two more children, one of whom, Ed, has become a successful actor.

During his second marriage, to the television presenter, agony aunt and anti-smoking campaigner Dr Miriam Stoppard, he had an affair with Felicity Kendall, the actress he considered his muse. He now lives alone in Chelsea Harbour.

He has written some fine Hollywood screenplays, including Shakespeare in Love, for which he won an Oscar, and some average ones such as K-19: The Widowmaker. And he has never stopped having hit plays, though they have become less absurdist and more political over the years.

Sir Tom is hard to place politically. He campaigns about human rights, which is usually a left-leaning cause, but he tells me his impression of David Cameron is that he is ‘an intelligent politician’.

Thatcher, meanwhile, took a shine to him and they met on a few occasions. ‘But I remember feeling out of my depth with her because I’m not a political animal and I shouldn’t have been there. I listened mostly.’

I ask him what he imagines the first line of his obituary will be. He thinks again. ‘Tom Stoppard, the father of the actor Ed Stoppard, has died.’

And when the obituary gives three examples of his plays, what does he suppose they will be? ‘Hmm. I wouldn’t deny you an answer, but I don’t have favourites. I would say Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Arcadia and the one I am writing now, which I haven’t started.’

Sir Tom likes being sidetracked and he won’t be rushed. Having seen nearly all his plays and rarely been disappointed by them, I expect the rub to be that I will be disappointed by him in person. I am not.

His conversation, as he maunders through linguistics, Cold War politics and aesthetics, is as rich and multilayered as you would hope. ‘I could go on chattering in this garrulous way for hours,’ he says at one point.

Curiously, he seems to swing from insouciance to vague insecurity, from self-deprecation to recognition of the regard in which others hold him.

He also has a love of cheap gags.‘The days of the digital watch are numbered.’ Or: ‘If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation.’

There is a typical example in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. A doctor says of a psychiatric patient: ‘Yes, he has an identity problem. I forget his name.’

Sir Tom is cerebral and autodidactic but not, he protests, academic even though his plays are studied in universities.

Has his lifelong intellectual energy and curiosity been a compensation for leaving school at 17?

‘Depends whether you mean compensating for it consciously or unconsciously. Certainly, I didn’t even think of it as a deprivation. I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn’t wait to be out of education. I wanted to be a reporter and I had a wonderful time doing it.

‘It was years and years before I felt a sense that I had missed out on something. I began to have certain kinds of regret about it, but that was partly to do with not having had time to read the stuff that everyone assumed I must have read because everyone has, and partly because those friends of mine who had got to know each other at university I felt were part of some stimulating, linked group and that was enviable. I didn’t feel part of that.’

Perhaps he was liberated by not having gone?

‘I think if I had it would have affected my work. I can imagine that I would not have become a writer at all, or if I had, a different type of writer.

‘I don’t, by the way, look back in poignancy about all that, I don’t worry about it. You deal with what you’ve got. And there are probably aspects to the autodidact life that compensate. They take me into areas where I wouldn’t have had time to go at all.

‘As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that.’

I ask what is it like having experts and academics analyse his work. ‘The thing that happens remarkably often is that the people who are writing a dissertation believe they need to speak to me in order to do their dissertation. They need to interview me,’ Sir Tom says.

‘I have a stock reply which is that “the examiner wants to know what you think, not what I think”. I write polite little notes, which say: “Honestly, you do not need me, you think you do but I am irrelevant to what you are doing.” Obviously, the yes or no factual questions I can answer, but the interpretations…’

He shakes his head. ‘The whole thing derives from a misapprehension about creative writing, which is that the writer is working from a set of principles or a thesis and the play is the end product of that predisposition, but, actually, the idea turns out to be the end product of the play, and the less I know about this play I am trying to write, the better.

‘The more doors there are for you to open, the better the play. Take Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, if the metaphor had been specific, the play would not have had the freedom to go where it wanted. Some students don’t see it as a metaphor but a puzzle to which I have the answer, and if only I would impart it they would get an alpha.’

He pushes the door ajar and, without rising from the sofa, lights up a cigarette and blows the smoke out.

‘A friend of a reporter I knew from the Daily Sketch came to the first night and he said it was about “two reporters on a story that doesn’t stand up”, which was about right.’

We talk about Degas’s tendency to rework his completed works, taking them off the walls and then destroying them by reworking.

‘I would be the other kind of painter, taking paint off rather than adding. I’m not a theoretician about playwriting but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched, the scene, the line, the word, at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It’s like Occam’s razor.’

Of course it is. And as I wrack my brains to think of what Occam’s razor is (something about the simplest explanation being the best one?) I am reminded of something a friend said when I told him I was interviewing Sir Tom: that he always comes out of his plays with a headache. The friend also spoke of Sir Tom’s plays being ‘emotionally cold’.

I don’t see this myself, but it is revealing how divisive a playwright Sir Tom can be. I find his plays warm, but then that warmth may be to do with their humour rather than their emotional texture.

Sir Tom reckons you can ‘miss the laugh’ in two polar ways. ‘You can miss it by giving the audience too much information, so they have no work to do, or you can miss it by not giving them enough.

‘This applies to every line, so it is not a generality about how oblique, or opaque, or transparent the play ought to be. It is a moment-to-moment decision you are making when you are writing the play, rehearsing it and acting it. The perfect play is when the audience has to reach to pick it up.’

He taps a support holding up the shelf behind him. ‘If you take this as the line, with the audience on one side and the author on the other, you have a dead moment if you only get this far.’ He taps the wall on one side of the support. ‘Or if you overshoot to here.’ He taps the other side.

One of the best lines in The Real Thing is spoken by a writer. He is comparing a good script to a cricket bat that is ‘sprung, like a dance floor’. If you hit the ball properly with it it will ‘travel 200 yards in four seconds’ and make a noise ‘like a trout taking a fly’.

If you write a bad script, or hit a ball with an ordinary plank of wood, it will travel about 10ft and you’ll drop the bat and dance about ‘with your hands stuck into your armpits’.

It’s a lovely metaphor and it seems to be about the music of language. Sir Tom lights up another cigarette, nudges the terrace door open a little wider.

‘An actor asked me this morning: “What does this word mean?” and I couldn’t really answer, because the character was in a riff. His words have their value in their sound and their imagery; it didn’t have any logical place in the sentence he was speaking.

‘It’s probably an aspect of the cricket bat speech. The information itself isn’t enough, which is why I am half in terror of being translated because they miss the sound. I think that is the writer’s metaphorical signature you were asking about.’

Sir Tom has translated Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, among other plays, and a few months ago he visited Chekhov’s house near Moscow for the first time and sat in the chair where he wrote The Seagull. ‘It got to me. The chair, the table, the inkpots. I’m susceptible to that kind of romanticism.’

Is there a desk in his own study that he imagines people will one day want to sit at and hold his pen? ‘This is a lose-lose question, because I’m not proud of self-deprecation, even when it is sincere. I cannot think of myself as that sort of person in literary history, and I don’t, actually…’

At this point I interrupt, filling the pause, and he loses his train of thought.

A grin. ‘Perhaps that was God telling me to shut up. For a long time I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all.

‘Part of me wants to avoid revivals because I think people will realise they have been fooled. The scales will fall from their eyes. So, in other words, I don’t have this centre of gravity at all about how good I am or how long I will last and it is better to be circumspect about that.’

While Pinter seemed austere and serious in his black polonecks, Sir Tom always seemed to cut a more romantic, amused, bohemian figure: the windswept hair, the scarves, the muse.

We are on the subject of Felicity Kendall. ‘Yes, she was my muse, in a sense. It’s a funny word. I’m not sure it’s the same as having an actual muse. But wanting to write for particular actors, such as her, goes back to the first time I worked with actors.

‘I wrote Jumpers for John Wood. I loved him as an actor and wanted to write for him. I don’t think the muse was a personification. She was more the spirit of inspiration and I could do with one now. I was thinking the other day, how did I begin last time? I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t think how I did it.’

For the first time, Sir Tom seems suddenly maudlin. I suggest the way to get around his block might be to write a memoir. Does he keep a diary?

‘No. And here’s a piece of self-analysis for you, I think I am mostly, unconsciously, trying not to co-operate with posterity. I am trying to destroy my papers.’

He sighs. ‘I keep some letters. I have a couple from Laurence Olivier and one from John Steinbeck. But the rest of my life I destroy as I go along.’

With this, he slowly lights up another cigarette and, as if sighing, blows the smoke out into the dark, London air.

What makes her so qualified to present a series on the British family? As it turns out, plenty.

On a darkening winter’s afternoon, in a gently lit studio apartment in west London,KirstyYoung sits forward on a sofa looking composed and groomed.The presenter of Desert Island Discs is 41, and today, dressed as she is in black trousers and top, with black varnish on her nails and ash blonde highlights in her shoulderlength hair, she looks like a deftly poured glass of Guinness. In her low and rolling Scottish voice, she is talking about sexual intercourse, for reasons I will explain in a minute.

‘My first boyfriend’s parents had a copy of The Joy of Sex on their shelves,’ she says.’I did look at it, but not properly. I was probably too young to deal with it, even though I thought I was pretty sophisticated. My parents certainly didn’t have a copy.’ By parents she means her mother and the stepfather she has always thought of as her father.They married when she was three. Her biological father, a policeman, walked out on the family when Kirsty was three weeks old. She was born in East Kilbride, near Glasgow, and raised from the age of eight in Stirling, where she attended a coeducational state school.When I ask if she was precocious there, she says:’Yes.Yes I was.’And how old was she when she first had a boyfriend? ‘I suppose my first boyfriend was the one who took me skating, and who walked me home from school. I was 12. I had my first kiss when I was 13. On my parents’ driveway. It was a moment of great magic,actually.’And when she first had sex? How old then? ‘Oh much older. I was a good Protestant girl. I was living in Scotland.Too cold there.You don’t take your vest off until you are 21.’

So she was 21? She laughs.’I’m not telling you how old I was when I lost my virginity!’ So, why are we talking about sex? Well, it is one of the central themes of KirstyYoung’s thought-provoking new four-part documentary series, about to be screened on BBC Two. Called The British Family, it explores the changing nature of the family from the Second World War to the present day, taking in the institution of marriage, the Women’s Liberation Front, contraception, money, divorce, modern parenting and sex.

‘Every generation thinks they invented sex,’ she says.’Yet during the war people were even more promiscuous than they are today. War is very reductive.The prospect of death brings out the most primitive instincts.We look quite puritanical today by comparison.You only need look at the Tiger Woods story to see how puritanical we are.’

The British family is a good subject forYoung because she speaks as a mother (to an eight year-old and a three year-old), a stepmother (to teenage children, 14 and 16) and a daughter of divorce. Did she talk to her mother about what went wrong in her parents’ marriage? ‘When I was very young, my mother told me she had been married before and she must have also told me I was the daughter of that marriage, and so was my sister. She told me again when I was five or six and she said:”Do you remember I told you?” but I didn’t. So she talked about it in a glancing way.We didn’t really talk about it properly until I was in my mid to late teens, but at that age you are only focused on yourself.To her credit, my mother wore her divorce very lightly. It was not her identity. It is not a painful subject for her.’

Even so, there was still a stigma attached to divorce by society at the time. Her mother remembers someone saying ‘and you with those two young girls as well’, as if it was a stain on her character.And if her mother wore her divorce lightly, it may have been for her daughter’s benefit, because, for all her precociousness, the teenage Kirsty did have, as they say nowadays,’issues’.

She suffered from bulimia for a while.Also,you suspect she doesn’t have as much closure on the subject of her parents’ divorce as she claims. ‘Without wishing to sound glib about it, it did happen at a good time for me because I had no memory of it. I never called my dad my stepdad. He feels like my dad. He’s been married to my mother for 37 years. This is the man who walked me up the aisle.The time when it did strike me forcibly was when…’ For a moment she loses her composure. There is a catch in her voice and a wet film appears on her eyes.’When my first daughter was born and she was three weeks old. It seemed a very significant moment, because that was the age I was when my parents split up. I was sitting in the bath wondering how I would feel if my marriage was imploding, when I had this tiny baby in the cot. I felt immensely vulnerable. I thought: “Good God.”‘ She swallows.’The emotional force of it hit me like a ton of bricks.’

One consequence of those formative years is thatYoung now feels she is not judgmental about other people’s circumstances.’People’s lives are full of grey areas. My mother never demonised my biological father, but divorce is full of pain and hurt. It’s traumatic.’ For a father to leave a baby that is just three weeks old, I press, something pretty dramatic must have happened.’I know. My husband was divorced and I am stepmother to his kids and the idea that he would have a life without his older two children is inconceivable.To watch him as a father…’ She trails off. She has said that she has not had ‘a relationship’ with her biological father since he walked out, but inevitably she must have been curious to know what sort of a person he was. Out of loyalty to her stepfather, did she block that curiosity out? ‘Well I did feel that as a teenager. I felt it would be disloyal. But I wasn’t quelling some well of hurt, because I had two parents who loved me.They were very present. I didn’t feel a gaping emotional hole. There were curiosities of course, there reasonably still are. But there weren’t dark moments when I thought I wanted to follow it. I think it is not in my nature to be nostalgic.’ In the documentary,Young has another interesting perspective, that of the self-assured career woman. She explores what she calls ‘the cult of the housewife’ in the Fifties when women were encouraged to think that their main function in life was to do the housework, prepare meals and make babies.As one of her contributors recalled, it left her feeling ‘bored, bored, bored’.

For her own part,Young abandoned her Highers and left school because she felt restless:’As if life was happening elsewhere.’ She sidestepped university and decided to work as an au pair in Spain and Switzerland, before joining STV as a presenter on Scotland Today in 1992.

Five years later she moved south to join the news team on Channel Five, becoming the first British newsreader to perch on her desk. She soon proved herself cool under pressure; reporting the death of Diana, Princess of Wales at 5am, and later, in an epic five-hour live broadcast, covering the events of September 11 for ITV News. She became the first woman to anchor on her own, rather than being alongside a man.

When researching her new documentary, she was intrigued by the advice given by the Marriage Guidance Council in the Fifties.They wanted to promote the idea of a ‘companionable marriage’ and it gave her a new perspective on her own marriage.’Around that time your wife became someone you socialised with.Went for walks in the park with. Before that, men would just go off to the boozer with their mates. It had a big impact. Some 10,000 pubs shut down in the Fifties when men started to stay at home with their wives. My grandparents were married for 60 years and their marriage only ended when my grandfather died. He didn’t drink the money away. He didn’t beat her up. In working-class Glasgow that made him a good husband. Such low expectations.A matter of two generations later what I expect from this same institution – marriage – is almost entirely unrecognisable.’ Her husband is Nick Jones, the multimillionaire businessman who founded Soho House, the private club in London favoured by media types, and Babington House, its country equivalent in Somerset. He went to a boys’ boarding school.’As a consequence,’Young says,’he was about 18 before he worked up the confidence to have a conversation with a girl, which I find charming.’

The world in which they grew up was pretty sexist by today’s standards. One of the most popular programmes on television in the early Seventies was MissWorld.’Can you believe the way they got the contestants to turn around so as they could see their backsides?’Young says. ‘So excruciating. But it was a big event in our house. In fact, we would go next door to watch it because they had a colour television. It was family viewing. I suppose you could say that at least the objectification of woman was all out in the open then. We are not as explicit about it these days.’We are in sensitive territory here, I suspect.Young is a skilful interviewer, but in the past her critics have suggested that, well, her being easy on the eye has not exactly hurt her career.’That’s a hard one for me to judge,’ she says when I ask about this.’I’m perfectly reasonable looking, but I don’t think I am arm candy. It’s certainly not the case that I was such a stratospherically good-looking person that I think they could only have chosen me for my looks. I think I look presentable. But whatever I say on this subject I am only going to end up sounding stupid.’ I ask if she has encountered sexism in her career. ‘Yes, but not badly enough to make me want to throw in the towel. I don’t think it hindered my progress. There were one or two glancing blows perhaps.And there was one occasion when it did bother me and I didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t deal with it particularly well, but I was very young.The flip side is I also gained from being a woman and Scottish. Because I came along at a time when networks were wanting to diversify.Thirty-five years ago, there wouldn’t have been Scottish newsreaders.And you certainly wouldn’t have had a young, female Scottish newsreader. So I think probably I would be kidding myself if I thought my being Scottish and my being a woman hasn’t helped me, if I’m being honest.’ She tells me a story about Michael Heseltine at the 1996 Tory party conference. She was trying to persuade him to appear on Channel Five.’He said:”I’m not going to have some little smartarse in a short skirt get the better of me.” And I thought, how interesting.That made quite an impression on me.

‘So after that I decided to wear trouser suits and speak their language. I made sure I wasn’t projecting a leggy lovely image. I became more conscious of what the clothes I was wearing communicated.’ She reckons that what people remember from the news is the weather, the sport and what she was wearing.’You are lucky if they can tell you the top three stories. It’s what you expect. It’s a visual medium. I’m working in radio now where none of that matters. As long as the voice doesn’t go. I was thrown out of the choir at school for having too deep a voice.They called me old man river.’

As well as Desert Island Discs and her documentaries, Young also has a nice little sideline as one of the regular hosts on Have I Got News ForYou. She comes across as sardonic and knowing, delivering her scripted lines with a poker face and great comic timing.’I get a real buzz from doing that. I realised early on that it is Ian and Paul’s job to be funny and anything else the host does, any ad libs, are a bonus.’ In person she has a dry sense of humour and a gift for impersonation. Her Celia Johnson is spot on and when we talk about the film Anchorman she even captures Will Ferrell as Ron Burgundy:'”Go f—yourself, San Diego [pause] One of the best yet.”When I was watching it with my brother and my husband I had tears rolling down my cheeks.They were looking at me and saying,”It’s quite funny, but not that funny.”‘ She could also relate to Broadcast News, even the moment where the anchor gets the sweats. ‘Yes. It’s a fish in water thing; there are people in a studio who just belong there.They are made better by a studio and I think I’m one of them. And there are people who just shouldn’t be there, who get the sweats and, for different reasons, it is a pleasure to watch both. I was nervous the first time I read the news in Scotland. So nervous I got big spots in front of my eyes and I thought I was going to pass out. But I learnt to love it and I don’t understand why people who are perpetually nervous continue to do it.

‘You have to ride the wave of live television and be enough of a perverse creature to enjoy it, because the opportunity to come a cropper is there.The great thing about news is that you never have to watch yourself.You do it and it’s gone. Watching yourself is rarely a pleasure.’

Is there anything about her own appearance she dislikes? ‘Yes, but women look at themselves so much they no longer see themselves. Most women spend time every day doing their hair and make-up and they just don’t see themselves any more. I can only see the faults when I look at my face. I think I look like I’ve got capped teeth and I don’t. I hate that. Don’t like that.’They are certainly very white.’I know.And I’ve never had them bleached.Yet when I see pictures of myself I think:”Ah, the woman with the fake teeth.” I don’t think it’s why I’m employed. People do refer to you as “blonde”, but all I ever tried to do in my job was look polished and presentable. I don’t think my editors chose me for the job because I was blonde.They chose me because I was a good live performer. I could keep my cool.’ She thinks part of the reason she has composure is that she has perspective.

‘All that can go wrong in a studio is that you make a prize a—of yourself. It’s not like you are doing surgery where other people’s lives are affected.As I get older I’m more happy to admit to gaps in my knowledge, because I regard myself as a reasonably well-informed individual. I think when you are 22 and you are trying to prove yourself, it’s different. I’m more relaxed now. A prime example was Morrissey the other day.On Desert Island Discs he read something out in German, Der Nussbaum, and I translated it asThe Walnut Tree and he said:”You read that!”And I said I didn’t. I happened to know it.Twenty years ago I would have been wrong footed.’

There is no denyingYoung’s powers of empathy as an interviewer, or her ability to inspire candour.The comedian DavidWalliams admitted to her that he had questioned his sexuality and battled with depression. Yoko Ono revealed that she had allowed John Lennon to decide whether or not to abort their son Sean.And David Cameron spoke movingly about his severely disabled son, Ivan.

She is into her fourth season of the show now, having been given a rough ride by the critics in the first few months.’I took it quite personally,’ she says.’But now I feel I can do Desert Island Discs without worrying about what people think. I feel I’m doing it justice.And broadcasting on the radio means you don’t have to watch yourself.You are judged only on the strength of your words, the tone of your voice, the sharpness of your mind.’There was another film we could have discussed, To Die For. In that, the ambitious weathergirl played by Nicole Kidman says:’You aren’t really anyone unless you are on TV.’ KirstyYoung became someone by being ‘on TV’, but she now seems to prefer being ‘on radio’. Perhaps ‘on radio’ she feels she is not only doing justice to Desert Island Discs, but also to herself.

Critics may have sent up her ‘sanctimonious and sentimental’ style of presenting. But Esther Rantzen, prospective MP, still isn’t afraid to hug her would-be constituents. Will her touchy-feely tactics work in Luton?

It is 11am on a flat and sunless winter morning and Esther Rantzen is holding a surgery with her constituents in Luton South. To point out that these are not actually her constituents yet, that she is still only the prospective parliamentary candidate rather than the sitting MP, would not only seem churlish and impolite but brave.

For beneath the high camp and flirty bonhomie – she calls everyone she meets ‘m’dear’, ‘darling’ or ‘sweetheart’ – lies a thin layer of icy determination and single-mindedness. As someone who worked with her once said: ‘Esther’s charm is like a light bulb being switched on and off. There is no natural sunlight.’

Her campaign headquarters, a small, two-room office, is in the town’s shopping centre and was donated to her by a local businessman. (‘Obviously,’ she jokes, ‘I’ll declare it in the register of members’ interests.’) When she opened it, both ITN and the BBC showed up to cover the event, a level of media coverage about which her rivals can only fantasise.

There are posters of Esther in the window advertising her website, esther4luton.com, and these remind you that she is one of the few people in public life, Boris and Nigella being others, who has no need of a surname.

She holds these ‘surgeries’ three mornings a week. The idea is that she opens her doors to the public to listen to their concerns, but what actually happens is that she becomes a magnet for the dispossessed, disillusioned and conspiratorial.

Because of the way she throws herself into ‘the people’s problems’, you could be on the set of That’s Life! circa 1981, a time when she was the third most famous blonde in the country, after Margaret Thatcher and Lady Diana Spencer.

She is a vision of calculated empathy. The widened eyes, the fluttering lashes, the head that nods as the mouth purses to denote seriousness, or opens generously into that toothy smile.

Esther Rantzen certainly knows how to talk to people, put them at ease, listen. She even hugs one man. He has been driven to despair by the Child Support Agency (CSA), which is forcing him to sell his house so that he can pay the £7,700 he owes.

When he starts sobbing she tells him to stand up. She then marches over and gives him a hug. And why not? Esther was doing hugs before Cheryl Cole was born. ‘You know what you should do?’ she says to him, looking up into his eyes (she is much shorter than you expect – ‘everyone assumes I am 6ft tall,’ she says). ‘When things look most grim you should find room in your life for something fun. Have you seen the film Up?’ The man shakes his head. Sniffs. ‘You should go and see it with your son. It will take your mind off the CSA, if only for a couple of hours. It will help restore some balance into your life.’ It’s good advice.

There is a lovely moment of confusion when the next Lutonian sits down for a chat. He is in his late thirties, I would say, and wearing a tracksuit and a beanie hat. ‘I like your hat,’ Esther says. ‘Made in Luton?’ ‘Yeah, I was born here.’ When the man has said his bit – about MPs’ expenses, quantitative easing and Agenda 21 – Esther asks him to come back in a month’s time and give her an update. Sensing she is humouring him, he says: ‘You think I’m a nutter.’ The blink. The serious face. ‘Not at all.’

When he leaves, she turns to her computer, which has an esther4luton screensaver logo bouncing around it, and taps in some notes, talking over her shoulder to me. One of the recurring themes of these meet-the-people-of-Luton sessions, she says, is that there are no leisure facilities for either the young or the old. Other concerns include parking, housing, street crime and unemployment.

As she is talking, a man in a cloth cap wanders in and asks for her autograph. ‘Would you rather have “with love” or “best wishes”?’ she asks him, without missing a beat. In many years of watching politicians on the campaign trail, I don’t think I have ever seen one asked for an autograph.

An elderly lady, who is pretty much deaf and says she has to put her glasses on to hear, comes in with ‘evidence’ she has gathered of corruption, but she can’t give any of the details away because it is ‘political dynamite’. It soon becomes apparent that she is what psychologists call a copper-bottomed loon. It ought to be embarrassing, what with me being there taking notes for a national newspaper, but somehow it isn’t.

Esther is unembarrassable. She just smiles that frozen smile of hers, shifting seamlessly from the serious to the frivolous, as she did all those years ago on television.

This is the second occasion I’ve seen her in action. The first begins with an early start at her seven-bedroom Georgian town house in Hampstead. The poster on the fridge here shows all the prime ministers of England. This is not her cramming for the job, but evidence of this being a family home.

She has three children and one or two of them still live here, on and off. The only other hint that this might be the home of a future politician is a photograph of her with Jesse Jackson. Most of the other photographs are of Desmond Wilcox – Dessie, as she called him – her husband who died in 2000.

We head up to Luton with her in the driving seat, behind the wheel of her hybrid car. She tells me not to worry because she is an advanced driver, a course that was given to her as a present. As she drives she tells me about her plans and I am impressed by her ability to multi-task, fielding my questions, pointing out The X Factor house, listening to instructions from her satnav, taking calls from her PA on her hands free.

Although she has two PAs who job share – as well as a team of five volunteers in Luton – she has a tendency to micro-manage her own life. You get the impression that this is a woman who could organise D-Day before breakfast. And she has nothing to prove as a campaigner.

In founding Childline, the 24-hour counselling service for abused children, she produced something of lasting value – it still receives two million calls a year. She even trained as a child counsellor and still does a lot of work for the charity. But you also suspect she is not a good delegator. ‘Domineering’ and ‘controlling’ are words that often crop up in connection with Esther Rantzen.

Her day today begins with a meeting at easyJet, one of the biggest employers in Luton. From here we go to a school and then to a hostel for battered women. It is exhausting just watching her.

There is no doubting her stamina, but you do have to wonder what her real motivation is, to be embarking upon a new, demanding career at the age of 69. Is it about craving an audience? Attention?

This would be understandable – after all, for 21 years she presented and produced one of the most popular shows on British television. An odd mix of consumer campaigning and misshapen vegetables, That’s Life! clocked up audiences of 22 million viewers at its peak.

But semi-retirement and the death of her husband seemed to leave her in an emotional void. She tried to fill it with appearances on Strictly Come Dancing and I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! but it yawned ever bigger. It is clear she uses activity as a way of staving off not only ageing but ennui.

When she appeared on In The Psychiatrist’s Chair more than a decade ago she discussed her postnatal depression, her fear of loneliness and her lack of introspection. Dr Anthony Clare noted that: ‘Ours is a narcissistic and voyeuristic world in which for some it can be difficult to be entirely sure one privately exists without some validation from the public world.’ Is that what her desire to become an MP is really about? We shall see.

Luton South was a safe Labour seat until Margaret Moran became one of the most high-profile MPs involved in the expenses scandal, claiming £20,000 in dry rot expenses for a second home in Southampton used by her partner.

It was this that made Esther angry. ‘I’ve got a cottage in the New Forest 10 minutes away from Southampton and so I know that journey. I know how far it is from Luton and know there is no way it can be justified as an expense. I thought, what an insult. I wrote in to a paper saying it was enough to make you want to stand against her. When someone from ITN rang and asked if I would be interested in visiting Luton to look into this, I thought, why not?’

She decided to stand against Moran as an independent. Then Moran announced she would be standing down at the next election.

Esther conferred with Martin Bell. ‘He made it clear his was a protest vote against the sitting Tory MP, and that was why Labour and Lib Dem didn’t stand against him. He said I should have waited to see who was the most notorious king or queen of expenses still standing and stand against them.’

Why didn’t she heed his advice? One reason, she admits, is that Luton is only half an hour from where she lives. ‘Had it been Glasgow East it would have been impossible for me. But more importantly, I fell in love with Luton. People in the street greeted me so warmly. I was touched and impressed. They kept telling me they didn’t feel listened to and that Moran was invisible.The more I saw Luton, the more I loved it. I love its history and its warmth and its ethnic diversity.’

History? ‘Famous for its hats.’ Luton is about two thirds Asian, with one of the highest Muslim populations in Britain. How does her being Jewish go down? ‘I went to a mosque and sat with a group of imams. I said: “Look I’m a 69-year-old Jewish woman, can I represent you?” And they said: “Of course you can, we’re British. All we want is for people to talk things through with us.” I think people are pretty practical. They just want someone to do the job.’

What about the Muslims in Luton who heckled the parading soldiers? ‘But it wasn’t the community in Luton doing that, it was a few people who were militant in their beliefs. I’ve had lots of Lutonians say: “That does not reflect what our community thinks.”’

A number of voters I spoke to said they thought she might be a good person to have as an MP because she is famous. She would get the town noticed in Westminster. When I tell her this she nods. ‘What I’ve been doing for the past 40 years is accessible. That will stand against me in terms of people who won’t like what I have done. On the other hand, they may be outweighed by those who like my record on child protection, or whatever.’

Either way, she will have some tricky opponents, including a new Labour candidate, Gavin Shuker, Nigel Huddleston for the Tories and a Lib Dem Luton councillor, Qurban Hussain. When we pull into a petrol station, she tells me she has to keep a record of all her expenses. ‘There are regulatory limits on how much you can spend in a campaign.

I can’t claim expenses but obviously you have to find the money from somewhere and people assume I am a rich television cat, but actually I’m an ex-rich television cat who doesn’t have the kind of spare money needed to run a campaign. I am working with volunteers, but they can’t afford to be volunteers indefinitely. I have to find a model, to see whether people who approve of the idea of an independent fighting a seat are prepared to pay to have someone with new skills and useful life experiences fight their corner. I am hoping people will offer small donations. I’m not new to fundraising.’

As to the specific policies she will be fighting on, she is keeping her powder dry. ‘The major parties haven’t brought out their manifestos yet so there is no point me rushing out with one. There is no point me making statements now that may soon become out of date. But in terms of national issues, obviously I am interested in child protection. And the expenses process – that needs to be transparent.’

Having reverted to her natural brunette hair colouring after an experiment with red and years of being blonde, and having made plain her approval of Botox, it is clear Esther cares about her appearance. Today she is wearing a leather jacket and pearls. ‘You do have to think about how you look. You want to be businesslike but not intimidating.

‘When I started in television, journalists would ask to do items about my clothes and I would say certainly not, because I want to be taken seriously. But now I have learnt that people take you at your own estimation and if you walk out looking like a pile of old washing they will think that is how you think of yourself. And that in turn is how they will think of you.’

At the school, the headmaster says something to me that makes me smile, for the wrong reasons. He says the trouble with the sitting MP is that she has no authority left since the expenses scandal. ‘She has no teeth.’

There is another poignant moment when Esther has to explain to a group of nine year-olds who she is, or was. ‘I made a programme which once featured a dog that could say “sausages”,’ she explains. This only makes them look more confused.

Afterwards, I say to Esther that realising these children had never heard of the dog who said sausages made me feel old. ‘I know,’ she says. ‘That is why I did I’m a Celebrity, I had realised that when I was talking about Childline to children, I no longer had the link I had had with previous generations, so I thought if I do a show like that, a new generation will know who I am. Quite a lot of them talk to me about the jungle.’

Esther Rantzen was born in June 1940 into a family of liberal Jews in north London. Her father was a BBC sound engineer; her mother was the governor of a day nursery. Educated at Somerville College, Oxford, Esther joined the BBC as a secretary in 1963 and soon became a researcher.

In 1967, Desmond Wilcox asked her to join Man Alive, where she became a trainee director. They embarked on an affair that lasted for about eight years. Wilcox’s wife found out and he moved in with Esther. They married in 1977, a month before the first of their children was born.

In 2001, when Esther published her autobiography, she became embroiled in a public spat with her stepdaughter, Cassandra Wilcox, who was unhappy with Esther’s scathing comments about her mother. Cassandra vented her contempt for Esther in a newspaper interview.

I ask how her relationships with her stepchildren are these days. ‘When I’m in Australia I try to see them. And the twins, I last saw them at a family wedding, which was nice. Cass, the oldest, I haven’t seen for a while. She was invited to Bec’s wedding [Esther’s daughter] but they were away.’ Does she regret opening that wound? ‘Yes, I wrote the autobiography at the time Dessie died and there were things that he wanted to say, things that had hurt him. Would I write it now? No.’

Before she had the affair with Wilcox she had one with Nicholas Fairbairn MP. What did she learn from him about the political world? ‘Nothing.’ Too young? ‘I think he was a barrister then. What I did learn about was the law. That a clever defence lawyer can run rings around the police. Nicholas was a dandy. He designed his own bowler hats.’

Ah. Hats again. And her preoccupation with them explained. Perhaps.

What would her husband have made of her becoming an MP? ‘Dessie tended to be the voice of sanity, but if he saw I was determined he’d support me. And it would be easier if he were alive because he was very practical and efficient. If there was a big decision to make we’d make it together.’

Esther appears to be someone who needs constant stimulation and deadlines to avoid the boredom of contemplation, of being with herself.

Is that what this is about, this need for a workload? She thinks about it, rolling her tongue against her teeth. ‘I do thrive on adrenalin. When I first said I was going to stand as an MP, Edwina Currie was quoted as saying that Esther doesn’t know about hard work. I thought, but then Edwina doesn’t know about presenting and producing a consumer show for 25 years.’

There is no love lost between the two women, another feud. Esther once said: ‘Fishnets are many things, but elegant they are not. I think they are quite sluttish. In the Eighties, I did go through an Edwina Currie stage of wearing them.’ Me-ow!

Esther will turn 70 within weeks of winning her seat in Luton, if she does indeed win it. Does that worry her? ‘Turning 70? I will be a mere laughing child. Do I think about that? Never.’

Esther Rantzen seems to be something of a Marmite figure, someone the public loves or, because of the mawkishness, self-promotion and sanctimoniousness they remember from her That’s Life! years, loathes.

I warmed to her. She may be a megalomaniac but she also has a pleasing line in self-deprecation and she certainly has fire in her belly. As to her motives, I suspect she thinks a late career as an MP would make for a pleasing coda to a colourful career.

But that’s not to say she wouldn’t be good at the job. A couple of weeks after we meet, she rings to say that the man who was being hounded by the CSA has had his case resolved happily. Esther had mobilised the local press, accompanied him to court and got them to back down on forcing him to sell his house. I imagine she would also put Luton on the map… if she survives that long.

She tells me she plans to walk the streets of the city centre at night to assess for herself how serious the problem of street violence is there. ‘I’m going with a kid who said he didn’t feel safe. I’ve asked the police and they have said it’s OK. I should be safe enough. There are plenty of CCTVs.’ Of course there are. And a camera is a camera.

There is a story in Jack Dee’s autobiography, Thanks for Nothing, which has been haunting me since I read it. Because he was a ‘very low achieving pupil’ at Pilgrims’ prep school in Winchester, he was picked on by one of his teachers. This teacher would make the young Dee stand on a chair and then say things like: ‘Dee by name, D by nature.’ The rest of the class would laugh and point.

Dee took his revenge, coldly and systematically. ‘I would go around the classrooms during break and if one of the boys from my little blacklist was there, unattended by a member of staff, I’d simply walk up to him and before he could say: “What do you want?” would punch him in the face.’ The more people he attacked, the angrier and more isolated he became.

‘It was like a fire that had started inside me. I really hated fighting people and hurting them, but felt unable to stop.’ I know, not what you expect, is it? The Jack Dee with whom we are familiar from stand-up comedy and television may scowl, but you assume his misanthropy is an act.

In person, he is friendly enough, if a little halting in his delivery. Today he is wearing a baseball jacket rather than the suit and tie of his stage persona.

He is 47 and stands at 5ft 10in, ‘allowing for a two-inch margin of error’. His features are set into an expression of surly anger at the world. He says ‘mm’ a lot, but whether in agreement or disagreement it is hard to determine. This, given how funny he is on stage, is unnerving. You wish he would crack a smile, then you realise with a start that he is smiling – and this is even more unnerving.

‘It was quite dysfunctional,’ he says now of his school days. ‘But it was my response as a child to an unhappy situation. I don’t think I realised until long after I had left that school quite why I did it.’

This cold anger had nothing to do with his background, by the way. His father was an executive in a paper firm and life was, he says, comfortable.

‘And happy. Nothing unhappy about my background at all. I think possibly, knowing myself better now, the anger was to do with creative frustration. I had no outlet for my creativity.’

The teenage Jack Dee failed common entrance and ended up at a comprehensive where he didn’t fit in because he was considered ‘posh’ for having gone to a prep school. He then flunked his A-levels. While his peers went on to university he went from one unpromising job to another, including working in an artificial leg factory.

He didn’t discover comedy until 1986, the year he met Jane, his future wife and the mother of his four children. On an impulse, he walked into the Comedy Store and took advantage of the ‘open mic’ slot at the end of the evening to have a go at stand-up.

He wasn’t exactly sure why he did it that night other than a feeling he had that his sense of humour was nagging at him ‘like an impossible toddler’. But he didn’t have a single thing to say. Not one joke. ‘It’s the kind of thing you wake up from, sweating, heart thumping, hugely relieved to realise that it was just a nightmare.’

The act before him was booed off. The crowd was baying for blood. He stood there at the mic and someone shouted: ‘Come on, tell us a joke.’ Quite belligerently he said: ‘No’. And the audience laughed. Then a question popped in his head. ‘Anyone here from Finland?’ The audience sat there with expectant grins. He waited until the silence felt awkward then said: ‘Well that’s my act buggered then.’ This got an even bigger laugh.

Still, to go up there with no material prepared. What manner of masochism was this? ‘Yeah, it was a strange situation to have got myself into. I was compelled to it. It was an appointment I couldn’t get out of and it was getting closer and closer.

‘I think I was drawn to that which frightened me most. I was chasing it down. I was so keen to become a comedian that actually doing the comedy itself almost came second.’

Another disturbing layer to Jack Dee the man, as opposed to Jack Dee the comedian, is the realisation that behind the miserable act he plays up to on stage and screen lies genuine and clinical depression.

He sees a therapist. He takes medication. At one point he thought his depression was caused by his drinking, which he says was out of control, but in 1990, after six years of AA, he realised that drink was not the problem. Depression was the problem. And the only way he could keep it at bay was to throw himself into work.

Work would set him free. When I ask him about this, on an overcast afternoon in the office in Soho where he does his writing, he says: ‘Work is a self-preservation matter for me. Without it I slide into depression. If you have the impulse to be creative, you ignore it at your peril. If I get depressed now it is because I am not doing enough creatively.’

And he uses his misanthropy and depression as a comedic conceit? ‘I think it is more a cautiousness that protects me from enthusiasm about things. I tend not to get excited. People perceive it as a scowl, which is fair enough.’

This was the making of him as a comedian. Everything he said sounded arch and funny. When he tried to be jolly it sounded even more sarcastic.

Even so, you would think he could afford to be a little bit happy with how things turned out. Is it, I ask, like the Oscar Wilde quote: there are two types of tragedy, not getting what you want and getting it? ‘Nothing tops the feeling of discovering comedy,’ Dee says. ‘But everything after that was tempered with a feeling that I was not doing things as well as I would like to.

‘I never feel: “Oh great, now I’ve got my TV show”, or whatever. I’ve never ever been excited by any of that. I remember the first series I was offered at Channel 4. I just said: “Oh, that’s good.” And after I left the room, apparently the Channel 4 guy grabbed my agent’s arms and said: “Is he taking the p— or something?” It was because I didn’t react. Didn’t look happy. Wasn’t pleased. Didn’t even say thank you.’

So he didn’t feel happy even then? ‘No, I didn’t really. Too cautious to let go. I think it was more a feeling of: “I have got to deliver now.” To sit back and enjoy it is alien to me. I have a weird inability to enjoy myself.’

He must be a barrel of laughs to live with. ‘Possibly I am difficult to live with, but I don’t bring my work home much. I’m either busy or not busy. And I don’t work from home. I have an office here which has a white wall. No view. I did try working in a room with a view but it was too interesting. Too distracting.’

I am fairly certain there were no ghost writers involved in his book, which is unusual for a celebrity memoir. Only he could have written it because it has his comic timing and dry humour. He explains that he lives in a detached Victorian house in Wandsworth, for example, but ‘Like many bastards, I have a second home in the country’.

The book is an engaging mix of self-deprecating anecdotes and stark revelations. Did he like the young man he encountered in his memoirs? ‘Yeah, I felt the need to deal with him compassionately. Not mock myself. There is a journey there.’ As the jacket says, you don’t wake up bitter and jaundiced. It takes years of dedication and commitment.

There are some tender almost poetic passages, too. At one point he describes breaking up with a girlfriend on the phone. ‘When she phoned me it was as if the meter was running, a clock ticking, time being marked until she could reasonably say goodbye and go. I could hear, in her cracked, short answers, the sound of broken love.

‘Inevitably, the final conversation came. Two people talking through wire, one in an empty London flat, the other sitting on the busy stairs of temporary digs. Four hundred miles apart and talking about needing more space. The words were awkwardly handed over, like a child surrendering stolen sweets.’

Religion has always been just below his surface. He only grew out of what he calls his ‘Carrie phase’ at school after he had a religious epiphany of sorts, a feeling of calmness while sitting in Winchester Cathedral one day contemplating a statue of Christ.

‘I remember wanting to look away but being unable to.’ Yet, though he felt a certain ‘longing’ and was drawn to prayer, he found it as disturbing as swimming with bricks tied to his feet. He even considered ordination at one point and went to discuss it with the director of ordinands for Westminster. It didn’t work out.

‘I was in a spiritual vacuum. I didn’t feel empty so much as unmotivated. I felt I was on the wrong train and didn’t know what station to get off at. What I felt most was a mounting realisation that life is too precious not to be spent pursuing what you ought to be pursuing. In many ways it was a positive force because it drove me. The sense of being lost was a self-preservation. It was a voice telling me: you haven’t found yourself yet.’

When he is working on Lead Balloon, the wry BBC sitcom he writes with Pete Sinclair, Dee is disciplined about spending time in this office, unlike Rick Spleen, the character he plays. Spleen is a hopeless procrastinator who complicates his life needlessly with excruciating lies. He is also almost pathologically parsimonious.

Dee describes Spleen as being a ‘what if’ version of himself. ‘There is a part of me that can be very stingy and it drives Jane mad. What Rick has, which I don’t have, is that capacity to be excited by things. He gets excited only to be bashed down when things go wrong. Maybe I fear things going wrong so much that I pre-empt them by not getting excited about them when they appear to be going well.’

Spleen is an indulgent father; is Dee unpushy as a parent as well? ‘The only thing I care about is that they don’t waste their time. I have to be careful not to push my own anxieties on to them and they would probably be happy if they were more relaxed than me.’

Lovely scented soap, that’s what Bob Hoskins likes about this restaurant around the corner from his house in North London. I know this because when he returns from what Americans call the bathroom he says: ‘They have lovely scented soap ’ere.’ He doesn’t call it a bathroom, by the way, even though he has spent a lot of time in Hollywood working with the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and Oliver Stone.

‘I reached a point where they said you may as well live here, Bob. It’s where the work is. Where the money is. Get yourself a nice house with a swimming pool. It was an attractive offer but I couldn’t possibly have brought my kids up there.’

Though he does a decent American accent, notably in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, you only have to hear him say a couple of words in his natural speaking voice to know that he is as cockney as jellied eels. He couldn’t live full time anywhere other than London – even his country retreat in East Sussex, an oast house.

Today he is sitting in an enormous, high-backed chair which seems to emphasise his height, or lack of it. He is 5ft 6in. Pauline Kael, the film critic, once compared him to ‘a testicle on legs’. For his part he describes himself as a cube and says that ‘not even my mum would call me pretty’.

But the camera loves him. He grips you with his eyes as he talks. And he has a mischievous grin, which he deploys generously.

Where were we? Scented soap. I was about to explain why this observation was telling. Hoskins, for all the high testosterone of The Long Good Friday, his unforgettable film debut in 1980, is oddly in touch with his feminine side. You could see it in his first television drama, Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven in 1978. He did a rather delicate, skippy little dance in that.

‘The choreographer got me to rehearse in a room without mirrors and convinced me I was Fred Astaire. Then when I saw the film there was this little hippopotamus running around.’

Getting in touch with his feminine side came as a revelation to Hoskins. ‘I realised one day that men are emotional cripples. We can’t express ourselves emotionally, we can only do it with anger and humour. Emotional stability and expression comes from women. When they have babies they say “hello, you’re welcome” and they mean it. It is an emotional honesty.

‘I started my career by becoming a stalker, watching women in the street, the way they greet each other. I thought if I could capture some of that expression, that depth of emotion, it will make me interesting to watch as an actor.’

What is he like now, away from the camera? Can he express emotion in private?

‘No, I’m terrible. I can only do it on screen. My dad died recently at the age of 93 and I found myself crying, then I stopped and thought this is acting. This isn’t honest. You’re not giving him the honest emotions he deserves. But the truth is, I didn’t know how to anymore. I was completely confused. It had become a curse. I can turn the tears on professionally.

‘When my dad died I thought I’m doing this for the people around me rather than for myself.’ And when he was on his own? ‘Didn’t cry. Partly because whenever I remembered my dad I grinned. He was a funny old stick.’

Hoskins’s father was a shy man, a bookkeeper; his mother, a nursery school cook, was more of an extrovert. Bob was their only child, born in 1942 and he perhaps felt he missed having siblings, given that he went on to have four children himself, two from his first marriage, two from his second.

He has been with Linda, his second wife, for 28 years and is devoted to her to the point of being uxorious. He has suffered from depression in the past and when he is feeling ‘fragile and pathetic’ only a cuddle from his wife will help.

I ask if he ever catches himself using his actorly skills with her, manipulating emotions to win an argument, say. ‘You do sometimes think, Oh, I could pull one here. But I’m not going to give you specific examples because my wife will kill me when she reads this.

‘One of the things I’ve realised is that I am very simple. My wife asked me once if I loved her. I said: “Look love, I’m a simple man. I love you. End of story.” But I guess you gotta keep saying it with women. I guess she needed reassurance. Blokes are very arrogant, they always assume the woman still loves them.’

Hoskins left school at 15 with one O-level and drifted from job to job: porter, lorry-driver, window cleaner. He then did a three-year accountancy course but dropped out.

His life changed dramatically in 1968 when he accompanied a friend to an audition and got mistaken for a candidate. He was asked to read for a part and ended up being given the lead. As soon as he started acting he knew it was for him.

‘I fit into this business like a sore foot into a soft shoe. But when I started I thought, Christ I ought to learn to act now I’m doing this for a living. I was a completely untrained, ill-educated idiot. So I read Stanislavski, but I thought it was all so obvious. Same with Strasberg. He just seemed to be saying look busy. Impress the boss. I soon realised actors are just entertainers, even the serious ones. That’s all an actor is. He’s like a serious Bruce Forsyth.’

The other great turning point in his career was when he realised that the camera could read his mind. It was when he was playing the doomed London gangland boss in The Long Good Friday. In the film’s closing scene his character realises he is being driven to his death. In two long minutes, without a word, Hoskins moves with measured facial gestures from shock to terror to wry acceptance.

‘For that last shot,’ he says, ‘John Mackenzie said I’m going to put the camera on your face Bob for five minutes and I want you to just think your way through the film. I said “you’re f—ing joking, ain’t you?” So I thought my way through the film and there you see it in the final edit.

‘We drove all round London for that scene. What I learnt from that was that if you was thinking the thoughts of your character, whatever you are doing is right, it is conveyed in your eyes and body language. The camera can see your mind. It takes quite a bit of concentration. You feel exhausted afterwards. But it’s worth it.’

Sometimes though, the camera delved too far into his mind. His latest film is Disney’s long-awaited Christmas Carol. It stars Jim Carrey as Scrooge and Gary Oldman as Bob Cratchit. Hoskins plays Old Fezziwig, to whom Scrooge was apprenticed as a young man.

The film uses ‘digital performance capture’ technology which captures the movements of the actor on computerised cameras in a full 360 degrees. It also uses groundbreaking 3D technology and animation.

Endearingly, when I mention this, Hoskins says he hadn’t realised the film was in 3D.

The director is Robert Zemeckis, the Oscar-winning director of Forrest Gump. He also made Who Framed Roger Rabbit? That film left Hoskins feeling very odd indeed. His doctor told him he should have a five month rest after that.

‘I think I went a bit mad while working on that. Lost my mind. The voice of the rabbit was there just behind the camera all the time. You had to know where the rabbit would be at every angle. Then there was Jessica Rabbit and all these weasels. The trouble was, I had learnt how to hallucinate. My daughter had an invisible friend called Jeffrey and I played with her and this invisible friend until one day I actually saw the friend.

‘I was following where she was seeing it. If you do that for eight months it becomes hard to get rid of. I went to this one do where I got talking to a very county lady with a big hat and there was this weasel in her hat with a big pr–k!’

Does he think now that he did actually go insane around that time? ‘My daughter, when I came back from filming in San Francisco, she said “Dad, slow down, slow down. You’re going barmy, mate.” And I was.’

He was hyperactive? ‘Probably talking too much, yeah. The character that frightened me most though was when I did Felicia’s Journey. I played a serial killer in that. Two weeks after filming, Linda said: “Bob, you do realise you are being very strange don’t you?” And I thought, Oh f— I’ve still got a killer inside me.’

Another psychological tipping point had been the break-up of his first marriage. In the aftermath his first wife accused him of being violent, though he denies it.

He now says he simply wasn’t mature enough to be married. He had a nervous breakdown, he says. ‘And funnily enough theatre cured it. I used to go to see a psychiatrist in Harley Street but then my friend Verity said if you are going to have a nervous breakdown you should do it on stage as a one man show instead, so I did.

‘I wrote a play called The Bystander about a bloke looking through a hole in the wall and talking to pot plants. On the first day, when the tickets had been sold and I was supposed to be on stage, I wondered off in a trance and Verity had to come and find me. I was talking to the ducks on the pond. She said: “There is not one f—ing duck here who has paid for a ticket. I’ve got a full theatre waiting for you get yourself in there.”

She grabbed hold of me and dragged me down the stage in front of the audience. I did the show and when the audience applauded at the end it was like something popping. I was fine after that. Verity opened a bottle of champagne and said: “Welcome back to sanity”.’

After his first marriage failed he assumed marriage wasn’t for him. ‘But obviously it was. I thought: what would my ideal wife be? I made this woman up in my head and on the Royal wedding day in 1981, when they kept pubs open to midnight, she walked in and I thought that’s her. Sweetheart, you don’t stand a chance.’

He claps his hands and grins. ‘I didn’t need to project. She was what I wanted. That’ll do. I’m very romantic. I’ve emptied flower shops.’

How important has his second marriage been to his mental health? Does Linda keep him grounded? Tease him? ‘Yeah. She will say, all right, you’ve done well, but remember you live here with a family and two kids. That’s more important than your work.’

I ask what he is like as a father. ‘I had quite a lot of time away from them, but Linda always used to bring the kids out with me on location. With my first kids it was difficult because I didn’t see as much of them growing up as I would have liked.’ Fame puts a strain on relationships, he says, because one person has a lot of attention and the other doesn’t.

‘But it also puts a lot of pressure on you. It separates you from the human race a bit because you can’t talk to anybody about anything apart from your career and who you know. That is all anybody wants to ask you about. You can’t have a normal conversation.

‘I just want to say: “F— my career, how’s your life?” I met a little old fella in Regent’s Park when I was walking a character around. He said: “You are who you are, ain’t you?” and I said: “Yeah, I am who I am.” And he said: “That’s good. I grow roses.” And we sat talking about roses all afternoon. It was wonderful.’

There have been occasions, though, when the attention from the public has become tiresome and he has lost his temper. Linda gets quite embarrassed when this happens, he says.

‘The thing is, when the kids were babies I used to take them up the park. There was one occasion when this group of people started pointing and if you have two kids you have to give them your full concentration and so I said: “Sorry I’m with my kids today” and this woman said: “Without your fans where would you be?” And I lost it and told her to f— off. I said: “I don’t need you. If you’re a fan then pick someone else.”’

The majority of people don’t see him as a celebrity, though, he reckons. ‘They think they know me. I was in Marks & Spencer the other day when this woman said “Bob, where’s the tea?” and I showed her and she said: “No, not that fancy organic tea. Real tea, the sort of tea we drink. PG Tips. Typhoo.”’

Although Hoskins has had requests from publishers to write his memoirs, he says he hasn’t got the memory for it. He has no film posters in his house, not even for Mona Lisa, the 1986 film for which he was Oscar nominated.

‘Dementia will be a friend. It will grin at me and say: “How you going son?” I’ll be like my dad. He phoned me up one day and said: “The mafia is laundering money through my bank account.” I shot round there and realised it was the pocket money I was giving him. “You prat,” I said. “It’s the money I’ve been paying into your account.”’

I suggest that he could always have told his father: ‘The mafia? I s–t em.’ He rolls his eyes, recognising the line from The Long Good Friday.

‘Yeah I suppose I could,’ he says. ‘I still get people coming up to me and quoting lines from that film. They will say “Cut ’im” and I wonder what the hell they are talking about because I haven’t seen it for years.’

He rarely watches the films he has starred in and having made more than 80, he often can’t even remember which ones he has been in. ‘I’ll be watching a film on television at home and then realise with a shock that I’m in it.’ That’ll be the dementia kicking in, I say. ‘Yeah,’ he says with a grin.

‘I’ll be ringing my son up and telling him the mafia are using my bank account to launder money next.’

There is a photograph of Jo Brand as, I would guess, a nine year-old, wearing a floral dress and looking slim and pretty. No, more than pretty. With a plait of hair over one shoulder and, with her big eyes and big smile, she looks adorable. It is reproduced in her new memoir, Look Back in Hunger, and the caption reads: ‘Yes, I was a nice little girl once.’ How poignant is that?

She is 52 now, with a long and successful career in comedy behind her. She has, indeed, a valid ticket to ride on the celebrity memoir gravy train, which has seats still warm from Paul O’Grady, Dawn French and Julie Walters, the top three best-sellers of last Christmas.

But her motivation, you suspect, was more than mere avarice. She wanted to work out for herself how she went from being that adorable child to her first incarnation in the mid-Eighties: The Sea Monster, as her act was called, a Doc Marten-wearing, spiky-haired, overweight, alternative comedian who, with her aggressive, scatological, gynaecological and, generally, feminist comedy, delivered in a bored monotone, scared the bejesus out of a generation of men.

It was often assumed that she was a man-hating lesbian, an assumption she did nothing to dispel (despite being a man-loving heterosexual). For the record, she is married to Bernie Bourke, a psychiatric nurse, and they have two young daughters.

She became a mother at 43 and was funny on the subject. ‘They say men can never understand the pain of childbirth. Well, they can if you hit them in the testicles with a cricket bat for 14 hours.’

The impression I get, as we sip coffee on a rainy morning in the bar of the British Film Institute, is that it really was all an act. In person there is a gentleness to her which takes you by surprise. And the impression you get from her memoir is that her defining characteristic was, and probably still is, kindness. After all, for almost a decade she worked as a psychiatric nurse herself.

‘It’s such a stressful job you shouldn’t do it all your life,’ she says in her lugubrious, slightly nasal voice. ‘After a certain amount of time you become blunted to people’s needs, or cynical, or in some cases rather sadistic. People do snap and they’re the ones who make bad nurses.

‘You need patience and empathy. Sometimes you only need to give the illusion of control, because if someone is waving a machete, as happened to me once, the worst thing you can do is be a weak, heap of begging, because that feeds into their feelings of being out of control. They behave worse if they feel they’ve created chaos.’

Because they sometimes seemed so happy when they were in the manic, or ‘up’ phase of their illness, Brand used to feel strangely envious of her bipolar patients. ‘They do all those things that you would quite like to do yourself but you don’t because you lose your nerve.’

Such as? ‘They react to every impulse. If they want to throw their house keys off Waterloo Bridge they do it. But however strange their behaviour, a good nurse has to always remember that her patients are still paid up members of the human race.’

She sips her coffee. ‘You just have to see through the abuse – and sometimes the smell – and treat them with respect. What matters is not degrees in psychiatry but whether you are a warm human being who wants to help people who are suffering.’

As it happens, Brand did also have a degree, in social sciences. And in recent months she has been able to put her experiences of working for the NHS to good comedic use, co-writing and starring in Getting On, a darkly satirical, three-part drama series for BBC4 about life on a geriatric ward. It does for the medical profession what The Thick of It did for politics (and it is no coincidence that Peter Capaldi directs it). A further six series have now been commissioned, and yay to that.

As for Brand’s empathy with her patients, she thinks that may have had something to do with her family background. Though her father, a structural engineer, was not diagnosed at the time, he was a depressive, one who would fly into uncontrollable rages.

‘At the time I just thought he was a grumpy old sod. Whatever situation you are in, that is what is normal for you.’ At one point, when she was 16, this anger led to her father piling up all her clothes and burning them. Is her father embarrassed by the portrait of him in her autobiography?

‘Not really. I think he would have been 40 years ago because there was more stigma about depression then. At the time I wasn’t aware of how ill he was, so I thought he was just being sadistic and nasty. You try and protect yourself as best you can. I would just lie about what I was up to with my friends and so on. I got away with it most of the time.’

If there was a moment when the girl in the photograph began to transform herself into the Sea Monster of her early stand-up career it was when, after her O-levels, she was taken out of the grammar school in Tunbridge Wells that she loved and sent to a sixth form in Hastings that she hated. It was a huge upheaval that left a core anger.

‘I knew at the time I was angry. At my new school I deliberately picked bad girls as my friends. Skivers. We played truant most days. I suppose I was punishing my parents by harming my own prospects.’

Things became so bad, she was kicked out of the family home. She went to live with her boyfriend, a ‘posh’ junkie four years older than her: ‘I thought Dave was the most magnificent person to fall in love with because you don’t want a conventional nine-to-fiver at that age. Wild men are so enormously attractive. He was Heathcliff. Mr Rochester. He was enormously bright and unpredictable and funny.

‘Other people thought he was a knobhead and I quite liked that about him as well. He never did heroin in front of me so he was being slightly responsible in that sense. But we did smoke joints and do LSD.’

So she never tried heroin?

‘I have tried heroin, but it wasn’t what I was looking for.’ What happened next gave her one of her most memorable stand-up lines. ‘I went on the pill when I was 16, put on four stone… so that proved to be a very effective contraceptive.’

Actually, she says now, it was three stone in six months, which must have been a huge blow to her confidence. But there is no denying that the subject gave her some funny material.

Her early stand-up routines would begin with her putting her mic stand to one side, so the audience could see her. She would then say something like: ‘I must be an anorexic because an anorexic looks in the mirror and sees a fat person.’ Or: ‘I was the child who was asked to play Bethlehem in the school nativity play.’

The jokes made audiences laugh, but did they also give them permission to bully her? ‘I didn’t see it that way. If anything, it was a shield. I was saying: I know I’m fat but I’m funnier on the subject than you will ever be, so why bother heckling me about it.’

As a child she was always told by her parents to think of the starving Africans and ‘finish her plate’, and she thinks that may have had something to do with her attitude to eating. Certainly, she doesn’t tell her own children to finish their plates.

‘I’m not a flag waver for obesity,’ she says. ‘It’s not healthy and you have a crap life because there is such a downer on it.’ I ask what effect her dramatic weight gain had on her psyche. She did, after all, find herself drawn to that which should have frightened her; you don’t need to be told by a heckler, as she was at her first gig, to ‘F— off, you fat cow’.

‘Yes, but it wasn’t as if I had never had comments about my weight. And I also felt that no one in an audience could abuse me worse than the sort of abuse I had had at work as a psychiatric nurse. People in a manic phase of bipolar are enormously eloquent and their abuse is focused and personal and raw.

‘So to go on stage and have someone shout “F— off, you fat cow” was almost a pleasure. A lot of them were just showing off in front of their mates. But sometimes I would get heckled and I could tell there was real hatred in it. I don’t know what that was about, perhaps common-or-garden misogyny.’

Brand believes crowds can take on an aggressive mob identity and become sadistic. ‘You get a sense of what the Coliseum in Rome must have been like. If the atmosphere turns against you they go for the kill. Usually though, an audience has booked to see you and that is fine.

‘But sometimes I will do a corporate gig where it isn’t me they have come to see and you will sense there is a sigh of despair when I come on. Then it becomes a challenge and it really feels like a victory when you get them laughing despite themselves. I like the purity of stand-up because it is all about whether people laugh at your jokes. Either they laugh or they don’t.’

Sometimes, when they didn’t, she would come off stage and cry.

‘Yes, the dressing room can be the loneliest place in the world when you have just died on stage.’ She shakes her head. ‘No, actually, the loneliest place can be in the car afterwards, when you are sharing a lift home to London from Manchester, say, with three other comics who stormed it while you died. They are embarrassed on your behalf. The etiquette is that no one mentions it.’

And here is another paradox, one that reveals a pattern in her life. Jo Brand was the aggressive feminist who turned out to be kind and gentle in person. She was the passive, self-sabotaging person who hoped to find lasting love from boyfriends who were incapable of being faithful to her (she split up with Dave after he cheated on her).

But her most contrary act was to try to get whole audiences to love her, as a form of self affirmation, of filling the emotional void left by her parents. She did this even though she knew they would attack her, and she would have to attack them, at least at first.

We seem to be in the realm of sado-masochism here. ‘Well, the more scary the gig,’ she says, ‘the greater the satisfaction if it works. And I did want to be liked by an audience. Feminism was not a fashionable school of comedy. I wanted people who hated feminists to realise we could laugh at ourselves, and be funny as well as serious and boring.

‘A lot of men after gigs will come up to me and say: “You were quite funny.” They never go: “You were very funny.” But quite funny is the ultimate praise from a bloke who would originally have hated me. I was happy to settle for grudging respect, I suppose.’

I ask her why she played up to the tabloid assumption that she was a lesbian.

‘Well, in terms of my dress sense I would have looked like that anyway if I was going out. But the whole black, baggy top and trousers look was because I knew a lot of women comics who would dress up in a glamorous way for a gig and that became a huge focus for the male elements of the audience. I would rather have men shout: “F— off, you fat lesbian” at me than “Get your t— out”. Men used to say the most awful things to attractive female comics.’

Did she enjoy the thought that some men were scared of her? ‘Yeah, I rather revelled in that. I had garnered a reputation for chewing up and spitting out hecklers and that served me well. But actually the toughness was all front.’ She is afraid of heights and the dark, she adds. And there is a vulnerable side to her which the public doesn’t see.

‘But I don’t cry easily and I deliberately don’t cry when people want me to, for documentary programmes and so on. Like when I did my Vera Brittain documentary and we visited her grave. It was p—— down and the crew were clearly hoping I would cry, like they always do on these programmes. But I think crying on those occasions, in an exhibitionist way on television, reduces the value of the emotion.

‘Crying should be a private thing. Of course I do cry from time to time, but I would never want to have an audience for it.’

With its white picket fence, Labour red front door and brown plaque commemorating his late wife Caroline, Tony Benn’s house in Notting Hill is something of a local landmark. He has lived here since 1952, mostly downstairs in the basement. There is a small printed note on the front door directing visitors down there. When I find him, the door is open. I ask about the plaque. ‘I put it up myself. Didn’t ask permission. Am too old to ask for permission. Takes too long, asking for permission.’

Too old is 84, though, as I am to discover, everything about Tony Benn, from his demeanour to his idealism, is strangely youthful. Harold Wilson once quipped that Benn ‘immatures with age’, but I think it is more that he is a Benjamin Button, living his political life in reverse.

His grandfather was a Liberal MP, so was his father, before becoming a Labour one. And when Benn first became a Labour MP in 1950, he was quite moderate. By the time he retired in 2001, ‘to devote more time to politics’, he was one of the most radical politicians in his party, and a constant thorn in the side of the Establishment, one remembered for trying to have the Queen’s head removed from stamps. Nowadays, his campaigning tends to be about single issues: he is passionately opposed to nuclear weapons, for example, as well as the European Union and ID cards. He is also the president of the Stop the War Coalition.

But we were talking about his wife, who died in 2000. ‘She was an extraordinary woman,’ he continues in his wuffly voice. ‘An educationalist and writer. I was so shy when I first met her at Oxford. Didn’t propose for nine days. Afterwards I bought the bench I proposed on. Had it in the garden here for years, then when she died, I moved it to our place in Essex, where she is buried. There’s a space at the bottom for my name.’

Benn taps down the tobacco in one of two pipes he alternates between as he talks. He tries lighting it, but without much success, and draws on it regardless. The clicking of the lighters, he has several lying around, seems to be a tic of his, something for him to do with his hands.

When not engaged in this way they flutter like trapped birds. And when he is making a point, which is all the time, his wrists rotate faster. Only when I ask if he ever catches himself talking to his wife when he sits on that bench now does a stillness descend upon him. He stares out of the window. Thinks. ‘Well, you know, you continue communication. Death doesn’t divide you,’ he says.

The basement is dimly lit. In-trays and out-trays teeter with papers and letters. ‘My filing system is messy but orderly,’ Benn says with a shrug. The shelves are laden with political biographies and lever arch files and on his desk there are a number of mugs and pots brimming with pens and pencils.

There are also several cans of butane gas about the place, making it look like a bomb factory. They are for the ubiquitous lighters. He still hasn’t eaten meat since becoming a vegetarian in 1970, still hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol in his life and still drinks about a pint of tea an hour. Teetotal indeed.

‘My whole life is in this room really. I come down at seven and go to bed at midnight. I don’t have a secretary so there are thousands of emails and letters to deal with. Very satisfying. Really enjoying life,’ he says. Benn’s idea of a dream day is speaking to all four of his children on the phone, which he usually does, and having his 10 grandchildren popping in and out. ‘My day rotates around my family. I am very lucky. Hilary [his son, the environment secretary] rings twice a week. We’ve never fallen out over politics. He said when he was elected that he was a Benn, not a Bennite. And so am I.’

Benn sometimes does his contributions to the Radio 4 Today programme from this basement, too, but more often he goes over to the studio in White City. While we are talking, his phone rings regularly, and one of the calls is from the Jeremy Vine Show on Radio 2. They want him on at lunchtime to talk about the moon landings. Often, he says, the calls these days are requests from obituary editors wanting a quote about people he has known.

For he has known everyone, from Ramsay MacDonald and Oswald Mosley to Ghandi and Mandela. His circle of friends has included Enoch Powell on one end of the political spectrum and Arthur Scargill on the other. He was, furthermore, the last Westerner to interview Saddam Hussein, a few weeks before the war. ‘I wanted to ask him to his face whether he had WMDs. He told me he didn’t. Turned out he was telling the truth.’

Benn’s compulsive diary keeping, he reckons, is to do with a moral responsibility he feels to give an account of his life. ‘I will present the Almighty with 18 million words and say, what do you make of it? I can’t go to bed if I haven’t done my diary. I always record them just as I’ve always recorded all my interviews and speeches,’ he says.

‘Experience is the only real teacher and if you keep a diary you get three bites at educating yourself – when it happens, when you write it down, and when you reread it and realise you were wrong. Making mistakes is part of life. The only things I would feel ashamed of would be if I had said things I hadn’t believed in order to get on. Some politicians do do that.’

Example? ‘Neil Kinnock. When he started in 1970 he wrote to me saying he believed everything I believed. Politicians are divided into signposts and weathercocks. Neil Kinnock gave up everything he believed in to get power and ended up with no one believing him about anything. That makes him a weathercock. Margaret Thatcher was a signpost. The trouble was, I thought her sign pointed in the wrong direction. She was not affected by spin-doctors, she said what she meant and people knew what they were voting for. I see myself as being more of a signpost, like her,’ he says.

Benn talks in aphorisms like these, as well as self-detracting anecdotes, well polished from his popular stage show: An Evening with Tony Benn. Given all his years of experience (as well as being an MP for 51 years he was also a cabinet minister, first in the Sixties, then again in the Seventies), I ask whether the political world still has the capacity to surprise him. What does he make of the current low standing of MPs following the expenses scandal?

‘I think you should always be suspicious of people who want power. I don’t mean cynical, but someone who has power is someone you have to watch carefully,’ he says. ‘When my father was elected there was no pay for MPs at all. He was a journalist who went to the House in the afternoon. The interesting thing for me about the expenses scandal is that it shows the importance of having a Freedom of Information Act. If that had been around at the time, no one would have been claiming expenses. The government want to know everything about us, but it doesn’t want us to know about them.’

Benn doesn’t miss the House of Commons, but he does miss his weekly surgeries. ‘Being a politician is the only job where you have one employee and 65,000 employers. I do miss that,’ he says.

Even Benn’s enemies would have to admit he has beautiful manners. He is always courteous, however heated the debate. ‘Well, I don’t believe you should attack people personally,’ he says. ‘My father taught me that. Democracy is about competing opinion, but you don’t have to be nasty about it. The personality side of things switches me off completely. I stopped reading the papers when they were full of all these personal attacks on Gordon Brown. What matters is what is done, not who does it.’

He was a victim of the personalisation of politics himself. The Sun constantly vilified him in the Eighties, running ‘Benn on the couch’ features that questioned his sanity. ‘It was very unpleasant. My black sacks of rubbish were collected every day in a Rover car. Now I know the Kensington Borough Council is Conservative and very efficient, but I don’t think they were that efficient,’ he says. ‘That car was being driven by The Sun presumably, or MI5. My son invented a rubbish bell so that when the sacks were lifted a bell rang and we could see who was taking it away.’

He also became convinced that MI5, or someone, was bugging his phone. Did he begin to question his own sanity? ‘No, never. But they always do this. If you argue for progressive change you are ignored at first, then you are dismissed as mad, then dangerous, then there is a pause and you can’t find anyone at the top who doesn’t claim that it was their idea. Watching those stages is a good way of analysing how far you have got with your cause.’

And the smears? ‘There is always some of that. They said I had a bank account in the Bahamas and I thought: Really? I had better write to the bank and ask for the money back then. My family suffered. Had to train the children how to deal with being photographed on their way to school. The photographers would eff and blind at the children in the hope that they would react. A horrible experience,’ he says.

In retirement, Benn seems to have acquired something that always eluded him as a working politician: likeability. He is still not clubbable exactly, but he does suit the role of sage. And the popularity of his theatre talks is a testament to the broad affection in which he is now held, and not only by those on the left. What is perhaps most extraordinary is his popularity among the young. In 2002, he captivated audiences at Glastonbury with his political talks.

To what does he attribute this? ‘I would like to be remembered as someone who encouraged people, that is all. When I talk to young people I say: “I owe you an apology because my generation made such a muck of the world, killing 100 million people in two world wars. Your generation has to get it right”.’

He sucks on his pipe. ‘I think Ali G did me a huge amount of good with the young. He came to this house and completely took me in and I argued with him when he said “bitches only get pregnant in order to get benefit” and “people only go on strike to chill out”. And I said: “Don’t be ridiculous”.You see, a lot of the people he interviewed were frightened of him.’

But as Benn was so confident that he was neither racist nor sexist, did that mean he was able to stand up to Ali G? ‘Yes and when I was told it was a hoax, I was furious. But then when I saw it and saw what he had done with the other interviews, I found it hilarious. He’s my main man!’

He is chuckling now. Before things become too cosy, I turn to a subject about which Benn is known to be prickly. There is an immoral equivalence between fascism and communism, I argue, because of the genocide committed in the name of both. Yet while the BNP is rightly vilified for its association with fascism, Socialist parties are not vilified for their association with communism. Why is that, does he suppose?

He stares at me indignantly. ‘Socialism? Socialism is a democratic idea. The most socialist thing we ever did was the most popular thing we ever did, the NHS.’ But isn’t socialism just a polite version of communism? ‘Oh that’s just the media. The two attempts at socialism in my lifetime have failed because the communists weren’t democratic, and the social democrats adopted capitalism. Margaret Thatcher said Tony Blair and New Labour was her greatest achievement, and she was right,’ he says.

Benn quotes Mein Kampf, a passage in which Hitler writes that democracy leads to Marxism. Yes, I say, but doesn’t Marxism always lead to dictatorship? ‘Good heavens no. Marx was a philosopher. Think of the things that have been done in the name of Christ. The Pope stole Christianity from Jesus and Stalin stole Marxism from Marx. All Marx said was the world is divided between the 95 per cent who create the wealth and the five per cent who own it. That was an explanation, like Darwin.’

Last autumn, when the banks were part nationalised, did that seem like a Marxist moment to him? ‘Not at all. A classic case of the state funding capitalism. If it were Marxism you wouldn’t have this continuation of the bonus culture. The economic crisis we have now is a product of Thatcherism and Blairism applied to the economy. No one has said the trade unions are responsible for the credit crisis.’

Does he now accept that the unions abused their power though? ‘Well they used to be described as the barons of the TUC, but barons don’t get elected. Emperor Jack was elected, unlike Rupert Murdoch. I think we do live in a one-party state in that all three parties believe socialism has failed and capitalism has somehow got to be made to work, and it hasn’t worked.’

His 19-year-old granddaughter Emily may be about to become the fifth generation of the Benn family to enter politics, having been selected for the seat of Worthing and Shoreham. ‘I went to speak for her the other day. Very bright girl. The interest in politics runs in the family. Both my grandfathers were MPs, as was my dad and my son,’ he says.

He had tears in his eyes when he spoke for her. Has he become more emotional with age? ‘Oh yes, I burst into tears at the drop of a hat. When I introduced my son in parliament, my family were in the gallery and they said: “It’s The Railway Children all over again.” I always cry in that,’ Benn says.

‘There is nothing wrong in crying, and laughing. The tight-lipped Englishman is a totally artificial construct. I think bottling up emotions is so unnatural. Why are we given strong emotions if they are not to be expressed? Hating people damages you and doesn’t damage the people you hate, and if you hate someone it makes you unhappy and doesn’t affect them.’

He may not hate people, but are there things he hates? ‘I hate war. War is murder, rape, torture and plunder. Churchill was right, jaw jaw is always preferable. But I’m not a pacifist. I believe in the right of self-defence. I joined the RAF in the war but didn’t get my wings until the end so never had to kill anyone.’

His older brother Michael died in the war, while serving with the RAF. ‘I think of him every day.’ He shakes his head. ‘Every day. I got the telegram at the beginning of an RAF training class about weather and I had to sit there for an hour and then I went outside and wept. I remember him writing to me and saying he had shot down a German plane and he was thinking of the German’s family. He wanted to be a Christian minister.

‘You can never fill the gap that’s left, but you can decorate the gap with the flowers of memory. Everyone dies. At funerals I think: here we all are grieving this person but in a hundred years’ time everyone in this church will be dead. All that is left is memory and what you remember is the things people did in life. You remember the people who helped you lead a better life, the great artists, thinkers, leaders.’

He stares at a pigeon eating grain in his back garden. There are 12 of them who come every morning. ‘I go outside and say: “Birdies”, then throw down some seeds. I also leave some nuts out for a squirrel who comes. Then a cat comes round and scratches at the window. It is a way of having pets without the responsibility.’

I ask whether he thinks Enoch Powell was right when he said all political careers end in failure. ‘Not in my case because I was a failure much earlier on. I was attacked all the time. Everything I did was denounced. In old age people are much kinder. Also I don’t want anything anymore. I don’t want your vote, and that is a great strength,’ he says. ‘You become a Buddhist by default because you rid yourself of desire. If I had known what fun it was to be 84 I would have done it years ago.’

Perhaps his career hasn’t ended in failure, but in a worse fate – he has been sentimentalised by the public. ‘That is the worst corruption, to become regarded as a kindly, harmless old gentlemen. Well, I am kindly and I am old, but I am not harmless.’ He chuckles. ‘I got a death threat last year. Hadn’t had one for years. I was so chuffed.’